Re: The utilitiy of IP is at stake here

On Sat, 31 May 2003 01:55:23 +0200, Anthony Atkielski 
<anthony(_at_)atkielski(_dot_)com>  said:

> That isn't millions of hours per day.  I get hundreds of spam messages a
> day, and it only takes me a minute or two each day to delete them; often not
> even that.
I'm glad that you have such a high-speed connection that you can connect,
download hundreds of messages, and filter/delete them all in a minute or two.

My mother doesn't have that luxury - a 56K modem connection from Earthlink and
Hotmail is as good as it's going to get on Social Security.  And as long as
spam doesn't find her, it's *sufficient*.  But if she has to start worrying
about more than a dozen spams a day, e-mail will become useless for her.

I suggest that you keep in mind that my mother is probably a lot more
representative of the net population at large than you are.

> I find television commercials to be a tremendous annoyance, but they don't
> cause me any losses.  And it's interesting that nobody seems to object to
> them, even though television programs are interrupted literally every few
> minutes by them (which, when you think about it, is exceedingly bizarre).
Unless you're a television critic, there's no real cost to the time commercials
take up.  And it's well understood that commercials are what pays for
free commercial television, and that's the trade off.

There's plenty of examples on the Internet where people have *willingly*
agreed to a certain level of ads in return for free service - the free version
of Eudora, many free e-mail services, etc.  However, there the trade off is
"I accept that the Eudora people will send me an ad for XYZ in return for
the free use of their software" or "the webmail site has a banner add for
QAZ to subsidize my free use" - Eudora has gotten money from XYZ, and the
webmail site has gotten money from QAZ, and in exchange for getting the ad,
the user gets the benefit of free/cheaper service.

But who's getting the benefit from unsolicited spam that neither the user
nor the provider agreed to?

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