On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 02:06:08AM -0500, John R Levine wrote:
Given that there must be hundreds of millions of domains and subdomains on
the net, a domain strikes me as a pretty fine level of granularity. And
you can have any policy you want, with NO UBE as a baseline. If you put
on a NO UBE banner and publish a policy somewhere saying "we welcome all
mail about kittens to meow(_at_)templetons(_dot_)com", kitten mail to that
address,
Problem is, get practical. Do you have any doubt, any doubt at all, that
this would make the banner the almost universal netwide default policy?
As you know, de facto universal policies are often viewed the same as laws.
If everybody picks the same thing, you have by definition not given them
really a choice. Everybody in Iraq voted for Saddam, remember -- but the
fact that they did means they didn't actually have a choice.
In a proper engineering solution, you seek a means to actually give people
a choice. Do you feel this meets that test? For example, if the banner had
a numeric parameter concerning the size of the mailing (and the rules
doing appropriate things to avoid any attempt to game the number, because
remember -- computers don't send e-mail, human beings do) then we might see
a variety of choices being expressed, which would be a valid purpose for
a protocol.
However, putting in a protocol so that everybody can set it is silly from
a technical standpoint. Same with a law.
The problem with a binary policy flag is that it effectively applies the
same policy decision to all,
Uh, no. See note above.
Within the grounds of the protocol it does.
To put forward analogy, say you wanted to propose a protocol for expressing
policy on the size of messages. And you only allowed it to say, "no
messages over 1 petabyte, please." Well, of course everybody would set
it and it would be meaningless. Or if it said "no messages over 100 bytes"
then nobody would set it. You would want to have it actually express
something to be a technically meaningful tool.
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