On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 06:17:23PM -0400, dean(_at_)av8(_dot_)com said:
[snip]
Spam on my measured-rate cellular-data PDA is real cost. Spam on my
measured-rate ISDN line (California) is real cost. Extra staffing to
counteract spam at my [isp|university|business] is real cost (setting
aside other costs that you seem willing to ignore). There are plenty of
examples to pick from.
Don't get email on measured rate services, then. Or don't publish the
email to measured rate services. Put your measured rate services on the
do-not-send list. There are many options besides banning commercial email.
Want to lay odds on how many of the hardcore spammers (spamsites hosted on
Chinanet, etc.) will respect a do-not-send list? They already ignore various
state legislations against spam (I'm a California resident, for instance, and
get any number of spams to various accounts daily that ignore existing
legislation on this topic); why would they pay any attention to a do-not-send
list?
(I'm also fairly sure such a list will not allow wildcards, and for those of
us running a domain where one address receives *(_at_)domain(_dot_)org,
listing every
unique address we've created over the years would be tiresome, to say the
least. I'm sure if this is not the case, someone will correct me.)
These are abnormal expenses which go directly into maintaining the
usefulness of my property and which do not increase its value. The right
to commercial speech would not warrant these costs for any other venue,
and there is nothing sufficiently different and unique about this venue to
warrant it here.
These are not abnormal expenses. You have deal with abuse no matter what
so, because I have an abuse person to deal with legitimate abuse problems
(both ingress and egress), I should consider it part of the cost of doing
business to put up with whatever the spammers want to do to me?
I wonder if AOL considers the cost of dealing with 2 billion spams _daily_ an
"abnormal expense". Especially when comparing their costs for dealing with
spam from 2 years ago. Or 6 months ago.
the form. You have to have an abuse person. Persons intent on performing
abuse will abuse whatever is handy.
Only too true, but it doesn't mean we have to 1) make it easy for them, or 2)
ignore it when they do.
There are no costs to warrant. Spam cannot cost you more than $1 or $2
per month per user. It doesn't matter how many abuse administrators you
have, or how big and expensive your servers are. Email (including spam)
is too cheap to meter. It is practically free, per person. Sites that
have 10 million users are going to have larger expenses than sites that
have 10 users. That isn't a surprise, nor a compelling reason to ban spam.
Tell that to AOL. Or Hotmail. Or any other large provider for whom the vast
majority of their network traffic is unsolicited commecial email. Your
assertions simply do not hold water. I bet they consider the costs of dealing
with that illegitimate traffic a fairly compelling reason to ban spam.
Anyway, I think commercial speech including spam _could_ be regulated, but
there so far is no justification for doing so. I don't think there is any
If you can make that statement after considering the cost (personnel,
bandwidth, and intangibles like degradation of the quality of Internet
experience the average consumer has) of spam traffic now, compared with the
cost just 18 months ago, I guess there is no chance you will ever see the
flaws in your reasoning.
chance whatsoever that spam will ever be banned completely, and if it
were, it would suffer the same fate as the Junk Fax law, which had much
more signficant costs (consumption of paper at 10 cents per page) and
10 cents per page, but there was also no single organization handling 2
billion incoming junk faxes a day. Apples and oranges, Dean.
--
Scott Francis || darkuncle (at) darkuncle (dot) net
illum oportet crescere me autem minui