From: Kee Hinckley <nazgul(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com>
If had Habeas had decided to arrange things so that most of the people
I want to receive mail from could use the Habeas mark, but no spammers
lived to do it twice, then Habeas's mark would have been the ticket.
Okay, I was thinking of a content type marker. But basically you're
saying that you'd be willing to receive email if you trusted a third
party to enforce some set level of accountability on the sender? And
that the key to trust is confirmed opt-in? I'm not clear on where
you were going with Habeas there.
The occassional references to fancy content marking are entirely wrong.
Our problem is spam, and that is related to consent and volume but not
content. The contents of mail can be a problem, but we must not even
start to approach the net-nanny business. We have centuries of experience
with humans trying to label and then censor words according to very simple
criteria such as "heresy," "sexually offensive," or "leaking war secrets."
We here ought to know enough about human nature and stupid computers to
see the insurmountable and inevitable problems of any content labeling.
The commercial HTTP net-nanny products are open jokes less because
their operators are frauds, idiots, or fools than because the problem
is too hard. The television, music, and other entertainment rating
systems are worse. Merely trying to distinguish "promotional" or
"commercial" mail from other mail is obviously impossible to anyone
who honestly thinks about the problem. This message might not be
"non-commercial" because I don't sell the DCC, but I do use a signature
that mentions a commercial outfit. It might be "promotional" because
I am advocating a point of view.
If every user on the Internet sent 5 objectionable messages per day,
the result would be a lot of angry people, but mailboxes would not be
overflowing. Spam is a problem only because each spammer tries to
send a number of messages that is a function of the size of the network,
and that overloads our mailboxs. If every Internet user sent 5 bad
messages/day, our mailboxes would have only 5 bad messages/day no
matter how large the Internet grew. The spam problem is that 0.001%
of users send mail to 10% of the Internet daily so that our mailboxes
now receive about 100 junk/day today. When there are 10**9 instead
of 10**8 users, our mailboxes will be hit with 1000 junk/day.
Mail that is not bulk is not a problem than needs our attention. Mail
that is sexually explicit, contains "hate speech," advertises some
product or service, or violates some other taboo can be objectionable
and justify punishing the sender. Unless it is bulk, it does not
cause any problem for the network or for enough users of the Internet
to justify the attention of the IETF/IRTF.
I don't need to know exactly what mail the people I trust to not spam
are sending to accept it. Occassionaly one of them will send me a
message that I find objectionable, but it won't be spam unless it is
bulk. When that happens I'll either deal with it just as I deal with
the same problem at home, work, or on the streets. I don't need a
IRTF/IETF nanny to protect me from the illconsidered word or kook.
The Internet is being partitioned into spam-friendly and spam-hostile
neighborhoods. The boundaries are currently defined by DNS and domain
name blacklists. Those boundaries are awfully course. Habeas or
something like it could draw finer borders.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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