From: Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb(_at_)guppylake(_dot_)com>
That would be relevant to your situation if you had any contract
with those intermediaries, or if you had deigned to buy real Internet
access instead of some sort of data service that happens to use
TCP/IP and parts of the Internet.
I don't care to argue over terminology, but when I say "Internet" I am
explicitly including the consumer-level services that are what 99.99%
of human beings think of as the Internet.
I think you're numbers are wrong, but that's irrelevant. The label
used by 500,000,000 users don't change the nature things. That
400,000,000 point point to a monitor and talk about "the computer"
doesn't change difference between a CRT and a CPU. What you are calling
Internet access is not. It differs from the real thing by both price
and features.
That is a straw man. Other than some governments, no third parties
are interferring with your mail. There are ISPs acting in accordance
with contracts with their customers to block your mail. You are
demanding that ISPs violate their agreements with their customers
and pass your mail.
And *that* is disingenious. A take-it-or-leave it contract from a near
monopoly is not a meaningful contract.
You are equating $30/month whatever-you-call-it with Internet access.
Then you claim that since the real Internet access available to you
costs more than $30/month, it is not available. I think that is not
just disingenious but dishonest.
from telephone companies. Qwest sells various kinds of call blocking.
By your reasoning, it is ok for Qwest to block telemarketing calls
with inevitiably grossly inaccurate CID filters but not for Qwest to
block email with much more accurate mechanisms.
If they sell it to me and I *choose* to buy it, that's one thing. If
I'm given no alternative it's something else. -- Nathaniel
You are misrepresenting your situation when claim that you have no
alternative. You do have a choice, but it it is not only between
nothing and $30/month not-Internet-access. You could buy real Internet
access, although it would cost as much as $400/month.
You compound your misrepresentations by implicitly claiming that the
same outfits that sell you $30/month not-Internet-access won't sell
you real Internet access. Some of them won't, but many will. If you
can get DSL, then you can get real Internet access. That 200 kbit/sec
or more of Internet access generally costs more than $100/month does
not justify your complaints about whatever you get for $30/month.
I don't owe you the subsidies for your Internet access that are
demanding. You want me to subsidize your access with my money and in
my spam loads. If you were willing to pay what broadband Internet
access reall costs, your ISP could afford real abuse instead of just
letting the spam flow from your fellow $30/month lusers, and it could
afford to give you spam filtering than the worst DNS blacklists.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com