From: Kee Hinckley <nazgul(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com>
...
I assume not. Which is my point. It doesn't seem to me that
anti-forgery laws would have any significant impact on spam. Whether
or not I agree with your assertion that most spammers don't forge
now--it's clear that forging addresses is not necessary.
I claim that the anti-spam-forgery laws have already caused far less
spam to have forged sender addresses than a few years ago and instead
carry throw-away, drop-box addresses.
I believe the main legal attack on the current spam problem
- will be a tax on commercial bulk mail of $0.01-$0.10/target.
- senders will be monitored by audits as in the recent "Internet
radio" settlement, unless lobbying by Verisign et al succeeds in
requiring some sort of "digital cash/tax stamp" in every message,
See http://news.google.com/news?q=internet+radio+music
- criminal penalties for failing to pay the tax will end the majority
of current spam, while avoiding First Amendment challeges or
hurting the major advertisers.
- some of the money will go to participating ISPs nominally to
subsidize service for the poor, minorities, homeless, K-12, etc.
- each licensed spam will carrry an opt-out link that will sometimes
turn off that spew for a few months.
- large advertisers will love it, because it will make spam usable
for them and raise the cost of spam enough to make margins that
sound reasonable as percentages yield good money.
- the tax will make spam expensive enough to keep our mailboxes from
receiving more than a couple dozen spam per day.
- the U.S.Postal service will see it as "leveling the playing field"
between it and the Internet.
See http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB104933535238475200-search,00.html
and http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=37528 for hints
- ISPs will love it, even if they don't participate in the free money,
because it will reduce complaints from their users and allow them
to reduce their abuse desk staff.
If I'm even slightly right, many of the proposals in this mailing list
will be irrelevant, because they are targeted at spam that is not the
majority now and will entirely disappear (forged sender address) as
well as spam that is the majority now and that will almost entirely
disappear (misleading sender addresses and junk from induhviduals).
The best hope of results from this research group is for suggestions
("best practices") that will make the opt-out links work better than the
advertisers would prefer and help the advertisers make their spews easily
identifiable so that the current plague will be more easily ended.
I don't think this will be be a good thing. It's merely inevitable.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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