Thinking about it, I realize that asking _you_ (an employee of major telephone company) is a silly question -- you have a biased viewopoint from a government-regulated monopoly
Reductio ad absurdum. Needs no other reply.
"it should be obvious to the meanest intelligence" that the matter *must* be addressed at a point _upstream_ from the destination network.
Of course. But a more advanced intelligence will wonder why we have to have an SMTP server architecture that invites attacks. Why, by definition, do SMTP servers have to accept connections from all comers, by default? We have shown that other architectures are workable on the Internet, where communications only take place between peers who have prearranged which devices talk to which. This worked for USENET news and it works for exchanging BGP route announcements. Such peering architectures allow you to introduce hierarchy into the set of bilateral arrangements, and as everyone should know, hierarchy is essential to scaling a network. As long as we don't fix the architecture of Internet email, we are stuck with the catch-22 situation that Amazon, and all hosting providers find themsleves in. These companies really have no choice but to allow spammers to exploit their services until the spamming is detected, either proactively by the provider, or reactively by a complaint to their abuse desk. And eyeball providers really have no choice but to accept this state of affairs, because without the hosted sites, there is not a lot of incentive for eyeballs to attach to the net. Sure, Amazon could try to react more quickly to abuse reports, but if more ISPs would get behind a standard like ARF or IODEF http://mipassoc.org/arf/ http://xml.coverpages.org/iodef.html then this would be possible without huge spending on an abuse desk that spends most of its time discarding junk mail. The fact is that around 10 years ago, the Internet lost its abuse reporting system and ISPs have not yet replaced it with one that works.
It is universally recognized in the real world that 'toxic waste' issues must be dealt with at the _source_ point -- where that toxic waste is produced. AND that the costs of doing so should fall on those who produce them.
And that is what we do with our retail DSL and dial customers because sending out tons of mail to port 25 is not normal in such an environment. But in a hosting environment, it is perfectly normal to send out tons of mail so it is not possible to be as proactive as you can be with consumer customers.
There is no reason that the Internet should be any different. The polluter is the party who *should* get hits with the majority of the costs of handling the toxic waste they produce, not the party simply tryng to enjoy the 'quiet satisfaction' of their own property.
Actually, there *IS* a reason why the Internet should be "different". In the real world, if you try to enjoy the quiet satisfaction of your property without locking the doors, and someone walks in and takes your valuables, both the law, and the insurance company will consider you to be negligible. You do have an obligation to take reasonable measures to secure your property, i.e. don't leave the keys in the ignition. The Internet is no different.
History shows that such attitudes weren't right _for_the_world_as_a_whole_ then, and societal barriers were put in place to prevent such abuses from re-occuring.
Prevent? I don't think so. Enron did happen not so long ago and it was not an isolated incident.
Your right to access any part of my network exists only -if- I extend you that privilege. And it _is_ revokable at whim. WITHOUT any need to 'show cause why'.
Go ahead, no one will sue you for that. But if you solicit other companies to join you in painting Amazon the same color as Cyber Promotions, then I would expect them to sue you and win. In any case this will never happen because few ISPs have a customer base that would allow them to cut off Amazon, and all the other cloud computing suppliers.
I _cannot_ deal with volume-based DOS at -my- end of my pipes; it -requires- blocking/limiting the traffic *before* it hits the choke-point that is my external connectivity.
This is one of the flaws in the existing email architecture because it invites anyone and everyone to hit your email server with as many messages as they desire. This invitation is what drives spammers to do what they do.
I applaud their _intentions_, and deplore their *implementation*.
In what way does their implementation differ substantially from any other hosting provider? --Michael Dillon