At 8:33 PM -0400 9/12/03, Hector Santos wrote:
Listen, I'm well experience enough to look at all these proposals, using
your +/- check off list and tell you that the ultimate solution is a
restriction/authorization concept. Do you design, develop and market a
So, you've made the technical decision. Now the next question of
course is a market question. Will it be adopted? (And this
discussion has occurred in the archives many times.)
Prior experience indicates that the adoption of similar systems takes
years. In the meantime such systems need to run in parallel. Since
unconstrained gateways would simply import the spam problem, the
system needs to remain unconnected to SMTP. So anyone who is an
early adopter still has to deal with all the spam they get via SMTP.
They then find themselves with two systems. One of which has a cost
of of entry that is non-trivial in terms of support and registration
costs (and you need to figure out how to scale that cost across
national borders, or else cut out large portions of the world), has
no spam, and which communicates with virtually nobody. The other
system has spam, but communicates with everyone they want to talk to.
Or in other words--early adopters pay more, but get no benefit.
Or, since we are putting this in terms of dead email systems. What
you are proposing is very similar to back in the late 80's when I was
developing mail clients for X.400. X.400 has a lot of the attributes
you are looking for. Strong registration and directory services,
very centralized. It wasn't adopted. There was this simpler system
out there that allowed everyone to talk to everyone. I can see no
reason why it would be adopted this time around (even if
significantly simplified). The barriers to entry for a new system
are large, and early adopters receive no benefit until far more than
50% of the population has switched.
What FidoNet didn't see coming, and what also killed Prodigy, is the
simple fact that people like to talk to people. The web has brought
people to the internet. But the ability to talk to anyone keeps them
here. Any move to a centralized and restricted system will be
ignored.
Also, you neglected the other post-implementation detail.
Enforcement. Let's assume that your system is 100% implemented. Now
someone from my system sends mail to someone on your system. Your
someone claims it's spam. Mine claims it isn't. Who presides over
the dispute? Who gets penalized? Who pays for the cost of the
dispute? What happens when government borders are involved? What
happens when *governments* are involved? What you are describing is
incredibly expensive to run. At very best you might end up with a
highly specialized and constrained system used by corporations and
wealthy individuals for mission critical communications. But the
rest of the world would use regular email for their communications.
This group is chartered with looking at the problem with email. The
new technology would not be email as we know it, and since email as
we know it wouldn't go away, our focus needs to remain on the
end-to-end, available-to-all system that will remain.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/ Anti-Spam Service for Companies and Individuals
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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