Router manufacturers benefit from larger amount of traffic on the net -
the more traffic there is, the more equipment they can seel to ISPs.
If anything, the point about decreasing traffic and unnecessary load
capacity on the net can be made to ISPs and they do already know that,
its the question that real protection against zombie is not that simple,
ISPs would need to have additional equipment that will redirect all
traffic from port 25 to their own relay servers and then they also
have to actually maintain their relay servers as well as put protection
so that one user could not send too many emails (i.e. when computer gets
infected and becomes a zombie) as well as notification system to let
the users know their computer is a zombie and customer support to at
least give them some simple suggestions on what to do (i.e. dump windows,
install linux and we'll help you on the way :). In any case, when you
think about it, you'll realize that ISP steps to deal with zombies is not
a simple process and can be quite expensive for ISPs. At the same time
when I asked once on the isp forum how many would be willing to mark their
dialup and dsl ports as non-mta end-user ports primarily if this would
help decrease spam - most said they would be happy to do it if this was
something that is no more complex then reverse dns.
On Thu, 13 May 2004, Jim Witte wrote:
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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