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Re: spam

2003-05-27 17:03:53
On Tue, 27 May 2003, Eric A. Hall wrote:


on 5/27/2003 3:39 PM Dean Anderson wrote:

I read the ruling, too.  The district court said that the government
failed to satisfy the tests for restriction of commercial speech, as
outlined in Central Hudson. The appeals court reversed.

This is more waffling, and is useless. The constituionality of the law was
upheld. Everything else is irrelevant.

The text you quote is summary of the case. It is not waffling. It is
neutral fact.

However, this is an interesting case, since American Blast Fax was not
represented in the Appeal, and had apparently gone out of business.

More waffling. Even if this mattered, the other defendant (fax.com) was
still in business. Not that it matters, since the court specifically
upheld the validity of the law.

No waffling. I don't know if it matters. Neither do you. It matters in
other situations, and so its a valid question. But it is an answerable
question, I'm sure.  It seems you are afraid to have the question
answered, so you attack the questioner.

Perhaps you can stick to facts. It is poor debating style to try to appear
to gain points by putting words in your opponents mouth. Someone else just
said that, and its true.

In other words, cost plays a big part in the decision.  But as has been
so roundly demonstrated, the cost associated with email is practically
non-existant, and does not ever cost any user more than $1 or $2 per
month, which they pay for email services.

The cost of a fax to a typical organization with bulk purchasing power is
probably on the order of $.02 per page, including the paper and ink used.
Using thermal paper from a retailer averages out to about $.06 per page.
It is very easy to demonstrate per-message costs in that same ballpark for
spam, especially once we get measured-rate circuits involved. That you do
not suffer from these burdens does not mean that nobody should be
protected from them.

No, this isn't true. If you pay $1 per month for email, and get 50
messages per day, then a spam costs you $0.0006666. A 6 cent fax costs
100 times this. Of course, this is a flat rate service, and you pay
nothing extra for having received the spam. You only have the annoyance of
having to delete it. It is a valid point to say that spam cost nothing
whatsoever in this case. The user pays $1 no matter what.  If the ISP is
concerned with the cost, then one has to question whether the ISP is just
seeking a monopoly control over advertising to its users.

If you pay $30 per 15Gigabytes (a relatively high metered rate) then a
1Kbyte spam costs $0.000002. A 6 cent fax costs 30,000 times this.

If you pay $599/mo for a T1, then a 1K byte spam costs you $0.0000012. A 6
cent fax costs about 50,000 times this.

If you buy bandwidth at the OC3+ level, you get bandwidth at around
$250/per meg or less.  At that rate, a 1K byte spam costs you $0.00000077.
A 6 cent fax costs about 78,000 times this.

There is simply no way you can put spam costs in the same ballpark as
faxes, without a lot of lying that is easy to debunk.

If you try to raise the cost of email, the so-called "charge-for-email"
schemes, one runs into charges of gouging and price fixing. Such schemes
are illegal.  Gouging customers is not going to help you get a law passed.

Basically, even at $1 per month, users are getting gouged for email
services. Prices will no doubt drop even further. Much less than that, and
its not worth the credit card fees.  Probably, everyone will stop charging
for email altogether, like Hotmail.

As has been stated, the junk fax laws are not limited to cost protection,
and also address the usability arguments.

No, the Appeals court didn't find that at all. Apparently, you didn't
actually read the decision.  The Appeals court decision, and the law,
revolved around the costs imposed on the recipient. The Appeals court also
left open the possibility that if the technology makes the burdens less in
the future, then the law might be overturned. The court didn't find that
the argument was not-applicable, but rather that the premise of the
District Court that the technology had made the burdens insignificant was
factually wrong.  There is a difference. What you are trying to say is
that it doesn't matter what the costs are. It does indeed matter.

It has been successfully proven in this discussion that a sufficiently
high volume of spam makes email less useful for its owner.

No, that hasn't been proven, either. It is frequently asserted, but fact
is just the opposite. People are using email more than ever. Spam has had
no effect on the useability of email.  I get 200+ spams a day. It hasn't
affected my usuability at all.  No one is complaining about the high cost
of their email service.  There are some people that are annoyed, but it
seems that anti-spammers are responsible (in part at least) for the
annoyance.

The cases where crashed servers have been reported are frequently not due
to Type 1 spam, but are due to Type 3 attacks and DOS attacks conducted by
anti-spammers.  Certainly, this has been documented. (City of Battle Creek
V ORBZ.ORG, Av8 V Chris Neill, and others) In other cases, where Type 1
spammers have sent mail (eg AOL), the ISP has successfully used existing
laws to combat the problem.

Techno-Terrorism by anti-spammers doesn't bolster the anti-spam case. It
hurts it.

You continue to exhibit an extraordinary willingness to argue your
opinions against the facts.

Likewise.

--
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/







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