Oh. mercy me, I tried to stay out of this. As an internet user I have been the party forgotten here. I do not like spams on worthless products and make money fast schemes, offshore business ventures, offshore credit cards and A host of other lame products by people who at best have no moral or ethical regard for depriving others of money by any means necessary. I would hope that the backbone providers can refuse to service businesses that harm their best customer interests and annoy and harrass their customers with material content not solicited by the paying customer. I hope that this perspective will aid in the formulation of A sound policy. Henry R. Linneweh Paul Flores wrote:
If you decide to start filtering out SPAM by blocking it from the source, do you end up becoming a content provider because you're controlling what your customers have access to? If that is the case, what legal implications arise ...
I was wondering if anyone was going to trip to this... Full credit, Mr. Shaw!
A recent ruling would seem to be in the ISPs favor: http://www.yahoo.com/headlines/971114/wired/stories/cda_1.html
To sum it up: part of the CDA indicates that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"
This woulds seem to indicate that an ISP can not be LEGALLY held accountable for the content published by a customer. (although in the case of UBE, I think the means, more so than the message, is the issue.) I don't think the issue of filtering comes into this at all.
Perhaps if there was some way to filter based on usage instead of content, the legal issues would be a little clearer, as one could block off 'offenders' based on thier abuse of your usage policy.
Comments?
Paul Flores Williams Communication Group
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