they're mostly not going to do anything until it costs them more not
to act than to act.
What if one could somehow bring the router manufacturers interested?
If any spam solution is to really work, it should dramatically decrease
the amount of Internet traffic flying through the routers, and
conversely, increase the amount of capacity for legitimate applications
(whatever those may be - anything but spam..) If they could make that
case to ISPs, business, governments (?), and possibly even end-users
that some combination of legislation and technical change could
dramatically increase the speed and efficiency of the internet, it
could have some effect. What effect, I'm not sure. But talking about
the "costs of spam" (other than e-postage, which has been roundly
criticized here), one very real cost is on infrastructure.
Of course, it's not clear how much end-ISP users will really care
about this as long as high-speed DSL in the US is not widely in use
(last mile is the limiting factor - I'm comparing "high-speed" with
places like Singapore, where I've heard they have something like 10Mbps
connections for half the population for prices comparable to dial-up in
the US). But businesses and universities (with fat pipes), ISP's (who
have to run mail servers and deal with all this crap coming off the
backbone), research institutions (those that aren't using Abilene which
isn't affected by spam as far as I know) *might* just care about such
an argument. Although, the "this will reduce your bandwidth and
infrastructure costs" argument is possibly contrary to the financial
interests of the Cisco's of the world.
Jim Witte
jswitte(_at_)bloomington(_dot_)in(_dot_)us
Indiana University CS
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