On Mar 12, 2004, at 1:07 PM, Vernon Schryver wrote:
That would be relevant to your situation if you had any contract
with those intermediaries, or if you had deigned to buy real Internet
access instead of some sort of data service that happens to use
TCP/IP and parts of the Internet.
I don't care to argue over terminology, but when I say "Internet" I am
explicitly including the consumer-level services that are what 99.99%
of human beings think of as the Internet.
That is a straw man. Other than some governments, no third parties
are interferring with your mail. There are ISPs acting in accordance
with contracts with their customers to block your mail. You are
demanding that ISPs violate their agreements with their customers
and pass your mail.
And *that* is disingenious. A take-it-or-leave it contract from a near
monopoly is not a meaningful contract.
While PTTs do regulate telephone service, Internet service is not
regulated that way in for most citizens of Western countries. Besides,
equivalents of the filtering you are complaining about is available
from telephone companies. Qwest sells various kinds of call blocking.
By your reasoning, it is ok for Qwest to block telemarketing calls
with inevitiably grossly inaccurate CID filters but not for Qwest to
block email with much more accurate mechanisms.
If they sell it to me and I *choose* to buy it, that's one thing. If
I'm given no alternative it's something else. -- Nathaniel