On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 1:34 AM, Joel jaeggli <joelja@bogus.com> wrote:
Email as facility is a public good whether it constitutes a commons or not... If wasn't you wouldn't bother putting up a server that would accept unsolicited incoming connections on behalf of yourself and others, doing so is generically non-rival and non-excludable although not perfectly so in either case (what public good is).
Interesting. I want to abstract and restate what I think you just said and ask you to correct my understanding: Making a service accessible to the public via the Internet implicitly grants some basic permission to that public to make use of the service, permission which can not be revoked solely by saying so. If that's the case, what is the common denominator? What is the standard of permission automatically granted by placing an email server on the internet, from which a particular operator may grant more permission but may not reasonably grant less? Put another way, what's the whitelist of activities for which we generally expect our vendor to ignore complaints, what's the blacklist of activities for which a vendor who fails to adequately redress complaints is misbehaving and what's left in the gray zone where behavior might be abusive but is not automatically so? Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004