nanog@ian.co.uk (Ian Mason) writes:
On 27 May 2008, at 16:33, Robert Bonomi wrote:
Amazon _might_ 'get a clue' if enough providers walled off the EC2 space, and they found difficulty selling cycles to people who couldn't access the machines to set up their compute applications.
This is a classic example of externalities in the economics of security.
Currently, any damage caused by Amazon customers costs Amazon little or nothing. The costs are borne by the victims of that damage. On the other hand mitigating this damage would cause Amazon costs, in engineering and lost revenue. So in economic terms they have no incentive to 'do the right thing'.
i've heard this called "the chemical polluter business model".
So to get Amazon to police their customers either requires regulation or an external economic pressure. Blocking AWS from folk's mail servers would apply some pressure, making areas of the net go dark to AWS would apply more pressure faster. A considerable amount of pressure could be placed by a big enough money damages lawsuit but that has a feedback delay of months to years.
to that end, i don't accept e-mail from any free e-mail provider, including gmail, nor from most ISP mail servers. all of them face this same economics decision, and all of them end up spewing quite a bit of spam, and there's no end in sight. e-mail sourcing doesn't scale. the highest quality e-mail comes from the smallest communities. EC2 will probably face some boycotts. i don't think these will change the endgame, whatever it is. -- Paul Vixie