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). On 10/27/11 21:26 , William Herrin wrote:
On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 11:59 PM, Dave CROCKER <dhc2@dcrocker.net> wrote:
On 10/28/2011 5:44 AM, William Herrin wrote:
A commons is jointly owned, either by a non-trivial number of private owners or by all citizens of a government.
The practical use of the term is a bit broader: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons>
As rule, the term gets applied to situations of fate-sharing when actions by some affect utility for many.
You cited air pollution. The Internet can suffer comparable effects.
Spam can reasonably be called pollution and it has a systemic effect on all users. For such an issue, it's reasonable and even helpful to view it as a commons.
Dave,
I respectfully disagree.
If you throw pollution into the air, it may eventually impact me or it may blow somewhere else. Mostly it'll blow somewhere else. But as lots of people throw pollution into the air, some non-trivial portion of that pollution will drift over me. This is the so-called tragedy.
By contrast, if you send me spam email, you are directly abusing my computer. The linkage is not at all amorphous. You send to me. I receive from you. There is no "all world" or "local area" destination. If you send without some specific pointer in my direction, I won't receive it. Ever.
Imagining spam as a tragedy of the commons disguises its true nature as a massive quantity of one-on-one abuses of individual owners' computers. Worse, it forgives the owners of the intermediate networks for shrugging their shoulders and turning a blind eye to the abusers.
Regards, Bill Herrin