Re: Principles of Spam-abatement

On Mar 12, 2004, at 9:22 AM, Vernon Schryver wrote:
> Your repeated misrepresentation of the use of blacklists by one party
> in a prospective SMTP transaction as vigilantism is as offensive as
> it it is a familiar complaint of senders of unwanted mail, including
> spammers and kooks.
I'm not talking about any party to the real end-to-end email 
transaction.  I'm talking about intermediaries.  I have no problem at 
all with user-controlled filters that do whatever they want.  It's when 
an ISP starts doing these things on behalf of a user who doesn't 
understand or want them that the problems arise.
> Regardless of what governments or anyone else might do about spam, and
> regardless of whether you and anyone else other than the targets of
> your mail consider it spam, your implicit claim to a right to send is
> wrong and scarier than any sort of Internet vigilante-style punishment.
I don't claim any such right to send.  In fact, I agree with you about 
your right to block.  But that right belongs to the you as the 
recipient of the communication, not to a third party intermediary that 
is not acting with the explicit approval of the recipient.  Just as you 
have the right to choose only "opt in" email, I have the right to 
choose "opt out" email blocking.  We need to preserve BOTH of those 
rights.  Eliminating the latter right is simply not the best way to fix 
the problems with the former right.
> Your right to send mail stops at the border routers of your ISP.
Bzzt.  Not in most Western countries it doesn't.  In telephony, equal 
access regulations have long ensured that telephone companies are 
required to interconnect their systems and NOT make third party 
decisions to block calls.  But that doesn't stop you personally from 
using caller-id information to filter my calls, or even from buying a 
box that subscribes to a private blacklisting service.  It's your 
decision, not your ISP's.
> Whether your mail gets any farther depends entirely on the sufferance,
> whim, and caprice of others.
Read your history.  This is more or less what the 19th century phone 
companies argued, and it's what governmental regulation of 
communication in a democracy is *for*.  The ISP's like to claim "common 
carrier" status when it's in their interest, but they should bear the 
same responsibilities as well.
> If prospective targets of your mail
> reject it because your IP address is divisible by 91, that is entirely
> fair, appropriate, and not for anyone but the owners of your targeted
> mailboxes to judge.
That is certainly one opinion, but the history of telecommunications 
policy in the US and elsewhere is based on a rather different opinion.
> Customers of ISPs that want to receive your mail
> but can't for any reason, whether the use blacklists, the prime factors
> of your IP address, or standard incompetence, have and should have
> only one recourse, changing mail providers.
This is precisely where your argument falls apart:  ISP's are 
consolidating and becoming more and more like common carriers.  Fork 
example, at my home in a modern American city, I have precisely two 
reasonably priced options if I want broadband:  Cable and DSL.  
Ultimately it is becoming a duopoly, and while that's better than a 
monopoly, it just doesn't leave enough options for a fully 
laissez-faire position to be realistic.
> Next you'll be telling me that if you telephone me, I can't hang up on
> you.  not that I would, but I reserve the right.
You have that right, and also the right not to answer the phone when my 
name comes up on caller-id.  But your phone company doesn't have the 
right to make the decision, on  your behalf and without your consent, 
to not cause your phone to ring.  And no, acceptable use policies 
aren't an adequate answer because the decreasing number of 
consumer-level alternatives means I'm likely to be stuck with a AUP 
that I find unacceptable.
I don't see any difference between this situation and the situation 
where, say, China uses its governmental/monopolistic powers to block 
all email from Taiwan.  It's an abridgement of a fundamental human 
right to communicate, which I think trumps the rights of monopolistic 
ISP's to cut their spam-related expenses.  -- Nathaniel