Dean Anderson wrote:
At 02:04 AM 8/26/98 +1000, Adam Todd wrote:
ISPs sell customers a TCP/IP connection to the Internet. To me that means taking my IP datagrams and delivering them to where I address them. I
UUNET sells connections to users that allows them to deliver packets? Only problem is so many places block more and more UUNET traffic every day. Eventually UUNET will have to do something about it's inability to transit anything except the backbones and it's a pretty lonely world out there on your own.
Yes, it certainly is lonely. You isolate yourselves, too. From purely that point of view, it is the smaller group that harmed the most by isolation. So, are you larger or smaller than UUnet?
That's the wrong question. The correct question is: So, are the collective set of all spam haters larger or smaller than UUnet? The answer is, of course, larger. Perhaps. just perhaps, the e-mail address space will end up partitioning itself into to camps, those where spam is blocked, and those where spam is not blocked, with no apparent gateway between them. Now you decide which you want to be in. I know there will be LOTS of people who will ONLY be in the blocked network. I find it hard to imagine someone actually WANTING to be in the UNblocked network ONLY. Probably many people will have a way in both so they can talk to everyone, but eventually it will be obvious that migration to the blocked network will have the least cost to the customers. Then the spammers can just spam each other (if they are on long enough to even read e-mail, which I doubt). Adam has indicated he already blocked UU.net. I am considering it. If UU.net and most of the others would just block spam, we wouldn't have this debate at all. But I can assure you, spam haters _will_ _not_ just decide to accept spam; the change _must_ happen at the sending side to avoid heading down the path of partitioning.
As I have pointed out numerous times previously, your tactics are fatally flawed and damage the cause more than help it. You're losing your battles, pretty much as I expected, for pretty much the reasons I explained previously. It's too bad. Some spam regulation would be a good thing, I think, but the radicals are making that impossible.
Spam regulation, as much as we'd like to have it, just can't happen. It is not practical principly because there is no single jurisdiction that can do it and make it stick. And that's even before all the free speech issues in the US, and the bungling when writing the text of the laws or regulations. I hardly trust US regulators and/or congresspeople to get it right, much less every government in the whole world, and that is what it would take to stop the spam by means of regulation and law. -- Phil Howard | blow4me9@no1where.org no35ads7@no2where.net stop5681@noplace2.edu phil | no63ads2@noplace9.com stop5205@nowhere6.com stop1462@spam5mer.edu at | crash128@no95ads3.edu stop7ads@no2place.edu stop3897@no94ads8.com ipal | end0it22@noplace7.net end7it73@nowhere8.org no0way62@no71ads0.org dot | a3b2c7d1@lame4ads.net suck1it1@nowhere4.net w5x2y8z2@noplace1.net net | stop6it5@anyplace.com eat80me0@anywhere.com w9x6y2z3@dumbads7.edu