Barry Shein said,
Well, once again, straw man alert.
Someone posits that it's impossible to set up and run a system based
on usage charging, asserted with nearly mathematical certainty.
An easy response is gosh, better tell that to all the postal and
telephone services as one example.
First of all, the PTSs have a monopoly in most places, and it's
inordinately expensive to break
into that monopoly situation. In the case of the postal service, it's
our government which has
the monopoly, and for many years the telephone companies had service
area monopolies.
In fact, most places still have cable service monopolies.
Port 25 has no such monopoly. We have a totally free market, whose
access is dictated
only by adherence to a standard protocol. Sadly, same protocol allows
falsification
and subterfuge.
Are you suggesting that usage of Port 25 (or whatever new port would be
used for the new system) should
be a monopoly? If so, what organization would own that monopoly?
Would there be laws inforcing that
monopoly, like there were for the PTSs?
Would port 25 be blocked by law, or recycled by IANA to host a new
service?
This is countered by the procrustean claim that aha, you said (e.g.)
phone service...then CLEARLY what you mean is that all email must have
an earpiece and spiral cord and a numeric keypad and entering email
via numeric keypad would just SUCK so forget this idea.
Red herring. Set up rather dumb looking strawman to represent opponent,
and then shred it.
Wha? Huh? Several cents per each? What? Numeric keypad? Who said that?
(key in Beavis & Butthead voice: you did, you said PHONE COMPANY!)
See, if one argues that it's possible that one day people will fly
(bill for commercial bulk email), and someone else says flying is
impossible, which is countered with "but birds (telcos et al) can fly
(bill) so there might be some way...", the right disproof might NOT be
"BUT MEN DON'T HAVE FEATHERS! QED!"
Let's be honest here (oh god not that):
This particular clique has as a deeply held assumption that all email
must be free and never charged for per item in any way, shape or form.
It's free now. Why will people pay for something that's free now? I'm
betting they'd live with
the spam before they'd pay to use e-mail. And that goes with ISPs too.
You have the weight
of the entire history of the Internet opposing you.
You have to stop ranting and prove to us that any new system would be
(like the digital tv
replacing NTSC signals) just as easy to use, but with less
noise/increased resolution.
Your new system can't cost more, or people won't move to it without laws
mandating such
movement. And, lacking a world government for such things, such laws
are unlikely.
The rest is just working backwards from that dogma.
You have no doubt it could be done, you just don't want it to be
done. This is the worst kind of demagoguery, the kind which no doubt
infuriates most in other venues. (Ahaha, regulate wall street, are you
kidding, you can't regulate wall street, besides it'd do more harm
than good, ahaha, wall st can only do good, what a dumb idea...oops,
lost *that* election!)
Wall street worked well, until blindsided by the NINJA mortgages (which
were a
government intrusion into the marketplace). Injection of politics is
another red herring. Sorry
I briefly fell for it.
To set up a marketplace, there has to be a resource which you control
that others will buy, so
that the laws of supply and demand come into play. To set up that
resource is the crux of the
matter -- you have to convince everyone that it is possible. I
personally don't see it --
I've got free e-mail, and my spam filter is good enough that I get no
spam, and zero falsies.
What would your method give me? [Hint: I can throw away my spam filter,
because I'll
never see a spam under your new system. Can you guarantee me that?]
Numeric keypad entry my eye.
Herring.
I'm sure if you ("you" plural) were generally favorable to the idea
you could see many ways to make this workable (and perhaps stop
ignoring the actual proposals being made over and over and over.)
Bulk commercial emailers should be made to pay. It would produce many
benefits.
It would be nice if they were made to pay. But they steal other
people's resources to send their
stuff, so I'm at a loss as to how to make them pay. And their product
isn't hurting me personally,
so I'm loathe to be made to pay to make them pay.
This is unlikely to begin to happen until there is some glimmer of a
mechanism to do this.
Agreed. But if the mechanism to achieve this is onerous, you won't have
very many
signing up to submit to it.
These sophomoric "proofs" that it's impossible, which only amount to
"*I* don't want it, and I am god of email, it shall bend to my will
alone! THEREFORE it's impossible!" notwithstanding.
We do have a democracy. If enough "I"s don't want it, it ain't going to
happen. You have
a set of movers and shakers here, and you are exasperated that they
aren't understanding
you. There might be a reason. So far I can't see you getting the
votes. This *is* an
election, you understand...
On November 14, 2008 at 10:28 asrg(_at_)johnlevine(_dot_)com (John Levine)
wrote:
> > Perhaps as an exercise we should take a month, stop all spam-related
> > topics, and discuss how the global postal system or telephone system
> > should work.
>
> Let's start by looking at how they do work.
>
> Phone and postal systems are either run by national government
> monopolies, or else by relatively small sets of private providers who
> need a government license to join the club. Members of the club do
> not interconnect with non-members; the only way for outsiders to
> connect is via a deliberately limited customer interface.
Yup.
>
> Eleborate and complex billing systems keep track of each message, with
> elaborate and complex inter-provider settlement systems managed by
> sluggish international bureaucracies (the ITU and UPU) that are part
> of the UN.
>
Yup. And we still get spammed on our cellphones, and our idiot kids
still call 978 numbers or
those Caribbean $100/minute places, in spite of all that bureaucracy.
> Except for limited places that offer unmetered service, e.g., local
> calls in North America, every message costs at least several cents,
> typically more.
>
> Is this the future of the Internet? I sure hope not. For a taste of
> what phones would be like if they were run like e-mail, look at VoIP,
> which outside of walled gardens like Skype has roughly the same spam
> problems as e-mail, and just as little success dealing with it. Google
> for RUCUS for more details.
>
Interestingly, you are making Barry's point here. His proposed service
sounds like Skype. A
walled garden. He has to convince all of us to come into the walls --
so convincingly that
we will pay to be within the garden.
RUCUS' job is made harder by the fact that when spammers take control of
a computer
they take control of the reputations of its users as well. The only
thing that limits
that type of damage is that when a spammer uses an innocent user's
account to spam,
the innocent user hears about it pretty fast. Spamming works best when the
spammers fly under the radar, so to speak.
> R's,
> John
Personally, the Holy Grail of answers must be some trivial tweak or
overlay to the current protocol
that doesn't invalidate the current protocol, but makes spam harder.
Their business model requires
a certain number of "clickbacks" per volume of mail -- we just have to
make it so hard to get those
clickbacks that the underlying model fails. Mr. Levine hints at
reputation. Your payment system
is a form of reputation.
A "pay" model certainly appears to meet that requirement, but given the
resourcefulness of the
spammers, I suspect they would quickly find a way to pay using other
peoples' resources.
I think spammers are chumming with the credit card skimmers, so payment
is no
object for them; this thought is borne out by what the spamhaus folk
caused when
they RBL'd pacific -- pacific cut one of their peers off and that peer
turned out to be
not only a spam emitter but hosted the command/control of hundreds of
botnets.
Cheers,
Doug Campbell
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