From: Meng Weng Wong
Sent: Sunday, August 15, 2004 11:17 PM
On Sun, Aug 15, 2004 at 09:11:48PM -0500, Seth Goodman wrote:
|
| Yes. You can't possibly charge enough to deter a spammer without
| hurting legitimate small businesses. If you are talking about a few
| hundred dollars per domain, that's chicken feed compared to
| the revenue
| from a spam run and easily absorbed as part of the cost of the spam
| business. My guess is that a real deterrent would be thousands of
| dollars at a shot, which would then be an inappropriately
| high barrier for legitimate small business.
Accreditation that is money-based is only one kind of
accreditation.
There's also "here is an address where you can have the
police come and arrest me if I've broken the law".
While I agree in theory, if a spammer walked into the FTC today to turn
himself in, he would probably be told to go home. I think it would be
very hard to argue that criminal prosecution is a credible threat for
spammers. It should be, and I hope someday it is, but today it just
ain't so.
I'll bet you the odds of a spammer being hit by lightning is higher than
the odds of them being arrested for any spamming-related activity.
--
Seth Goodman