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?
I certainly hope so. Since we've learned that UBE is rapidly making
e-mail unusable, the practical options are some sort of ban on UBE or no
e-mail at all. I would guess that we'd also agree that any sort of system
that allowed people to opt out of UBE would be universally taken up, so
the effect of your position here is to oppose any limits on UBE. Surely
that's not what you want.
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.
People can ask for any e-mail they want. That's a real and useful choice.
Choices have to make a meaningful difference to be important. I don't
have the choice to drive down the left side of the road, but that doesn't
limit my ability to get where I want to go.
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 ...
Forget it, that's too complicated. The point here is to come up with
something that is useful but still simple enough that it can be referred
to in a law and interpreted by judges who are not dumb but don't have a
software background. I can confirm that explaining NO UCE and NO UBE to
legislators and staffers is pretty easy, since I've done it.
However, putting in a protocol so that everybody can set it is silly from
a technical standpoint. Same with a law.
There's an entirely sensible reason for definining it this way, which I
suspect you already know. Server banners allow laws to be phrased in
terms of property rights, as opposed to laws that would completely ban
classes of mail which get tied up in knots with arguments about free
speech. I happen to think the free speech arguments are misguided,
particularly in view of the strong recent appellate opinion upholding the
junk fax law, but it's clear that a pure NO UBE or NO UBCE law isn't going
to happen. Politics is the art of the possible, and NO UBE is possible
and achieves a result with negligible practical downside, since it still
lets every user ask for and get any mail that he or she wants.
Any sort of opt out or tagging rule or any other limit on spam is
meaningless without a legal stick to whack violators, so I don't see much
point in defining constructs that have no chance of having the necessary
stick attached.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet
for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg