on 5/25/2003 10:27 AM Lloyd Wood wrote:
On Sun, 25 May 2003, Eric A. Hall wrote:
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.
But giving more rights to organisations is unbalanced.
The preference for me is to discuss the cost to the organizations which
are measurably significant, and then talk about the trickle-down affect to
the individuals who are subsequently affected. This gets both sides of the
aisle, as it were.
"Organizations" include ISPs, small businesses, schools, universities,
multinationals and so forth, all of whom incur ongoing reinvestment
expenses for additional bandwidth (typically measured-rate), storage
capacity, cpu processing capacity, software and filtering service costs,
and personnel costs. All of those expenses are property management costs
which do not increase return, suck up otherwise-available investment
capital, delay discounts in competitive markets, and negatively affect
productivity. The cost to individuals for spam is frequently flat-rate and
negligible, although they do end up incurring the organizational costs in
the end through permanently-delayed rate reductions, which are measurable
and significant in comparison to the direct expenses.
I think we've already passed the point where organisations have more
rights than people.
Nobody seems to think there is a cost associated with "hit delete"
--
Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/