On Mon, 2010-02-22 at 21:20 -0800, Dave CROCKER wrote:
In general, a core problem with the Knesset law is that it presumes something that is viable for the phone infrastructure is equally - or at least tolerably - viable in the email infrastructure. Unfortunately, the details of the two are massively different in terms of architecture, service model, cost structures and operational skills.
Good point Dave; for the mobile phone industry, number portability is an endpoint thing - no harder to change than a field in a billing/accounting database (the SIM#, keeping it very simple here), for email its a WHOLE lot more. eg: would you want to start accepting huge email flows from other ASs outside your own? Even from your country's most incompetent and fat-fingered ASs? All at once, not just your normal peers? I can smell spam at huge volumes if it isn't done carefully. Any solution must be highly scale _very_ well. Potentially, globally. >eek< Restricting the argument to a few hundred lightly-used webmail-only accounts, there's very little problem. What you need is reciprocal agreements to keep web accounts active after a user migrates, or even good-old-fashioned forwarding. Maybe they politicians just noticed forwarding in their MS Outlook one day and said "Hey, this solves the a problem easily". If only..... But we're talking about )_millions_ of people here. I don't know the ISP churn rate there for domestic users, but my head hertz already thinking of the sheer volume and frequency [< Hz pun] of changes. Or, will people end up keeping 30 email accounts live, adding a new one at each change, loopholing the system every time? Even the paperwork for this could be hard to implement if they're not careful. The more I think about this, the more spam I smell cooking. Egg, beans chips and Spam. Spam Spam egg beans and spam, etc Now, it's > 05:30hrs here - as usual, I'm getting tired and my brain is running (somewhat) amok with the thought of crazy laws to come in the years ahead, but imagine an extreme scenario where we have to invent a global DNS-like system just to find a given international email account's current endpoint for delivery AND acceptance, all compliant with existing mail delivery. Or Planet-wide LDAP+RADIUS, in realtime, just for 95>99% spam flows? What are they going to "invent" next? I know I'm seeing a nightmare scenario, but politicians have very little idea of the the technology, at all. Scarily, legislation would hold ISPs to it, or pay the price in fines/surcharges/whatever. So it all does need hard engineering consideration, I think, rather than just a "it'll never work" attitude that I'm sorely tempted to take for now. I'm worrying deeper into this than necessary, I think; I'm thinking not so much about this _current_ legislation, (it has no geographical effect to me) but of copycat implementations worldwide getting more and more absurd as politicians add local spin and conditions to it. Realistically, I'm not sure that when I wake up after 8 hours sleep I'll feel better about it at all. nite, Gord PS - just though of a relevant .sig for this topic, below -- "Its easy to spout, much harder to route"