Re: The right to refuse, was: Re: Principles of Spam-abatement

Dean Anderson wrote:
> > Given that, should the IETF pursue development of standards to make 
> > abuse reporting easier to facilitate the work of those ISPs that 
> > actually do handle abuse reports properly? 
>
> I'm not against a protocol to help share abuse reports. However, I haven't
> seen this as much of a problem.  As a network operator, I know what other
> network operators are looking for in terms of logs and evidence of
> misbehavior. It is quite a lot different from what radical antispammers
> demand, but those demands don't meet even the thinnest standard for
> breaking a contract.  This is not really any different from, say, a lawyer
> knowing what elements make up a legal case, and where to file a case. The
> elements and format vary somewhat depending on the topic, and particular
> court, but every lawyer knows what they are, or ought to.  Likewise, the
> network professionals generally know what is needed for an abuse report,
> or ought to.
Our intent (the ASRG) in proposing such idea was in order to make abuse 
handling cheaper for ISPs since machine-readable abuse-reports can be 
parsed directly into helpdesk software without a need for a human being 
to type the information in. Obviously this is geared towards the ISPs 
that handle abuse reports properly today but can in theory be used to 
help non-compliant ISPs to start handling abuse if the tools are made 
available at a cheap enough cost. The overall effect in theory would 
allow ISPs to spend less money handling more abuse reports with better 
efficiency. At this time one of the closed subgroups of the ASRG 
(http://asrg.sp.am/subgroups/abuse_reports.shtml) is looking for 
volunteers to continue the discussion on this subject further in order 
to determine whether there is sufficient benefit vs. cost for this 
proposal, and whether the ISP industry at large will even be interested 
in this.
Like I said in a different message. this is an example of something we 
can do now - pick out subsets of the spam problem and possible 
solutions, gather small groups of people to discuss it in detail 
including the benefits, costs, whether it will actually do anything, and 
industry interest; and for those solutions that actually make sense 
after discussing them in detail will be transferred over to the IETF as 
new WGs. This is what we are trying to do at the ASRG and this is 
something that we can do now.
Yakov