on 5/25/2003 6:18 AM Anthony Atkielski wrote:
The legal system taking over something that should be done by IETF.
I don't know of anything that IETF can do about spam, either.
As long as it's possible to e-mail messages and make more money from
the handful of replies than it cost to send out the messages, spam will
persist. Legal sanctions are fine, but there isn't really any way to
track down the spammers in many cases, or they are out of legal reach.
Kind of like someone sending junk mail with no return address from
overseas.
Well, *that* is exactly what the IETF can do about it; improving the
veracity of email would go a long way towards enabling private enforcement
options (not to mention other problems like simple forgeries). The laws
that folks want won't work effectively and efficiently without the
technology in place to support it, and the IETF is uniquely qualified to
develop and promote that technology.
I wrote my first-ever letter to congress yesterday, demanding a law that
protects the property rights of organizations over commercial speech and
allows for private civil enforcement (specifically an extension to the
TCPA). I also promised to help develop email technology which would
address the credibility issues, since that seems to be the popular
complaint against such an approach.
Everybody knows that we can't fix this through laws or technology alone
but we can fix it by balancing the two.
--
Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/