At 11:45 PM 3/20/2002 -0500, you wrote: >So it is up to the ISP to stop it before it gets to be a problem, yet some >ISP's are crackpots too. And there is no regulatory agency governing ISP's >because there is no world government (amen).
I have two issues here. First, I disagree with the assumption that it is incumbent upon ISPs to stop spam. Second, I wonder who gets to arbiter of when "[spam] gets to be a problem", and how that determination might be made. As we have all heard, the problem with spam is not that it's invasive, annoying, or offensive - even though it's often all of these. The true problem with spam is that it increases everyone's cost to access the network. If the world assumes (or worse, legislates) that ISPs are in charge of spam reduction, how can that remedy the real problem? What if the ISP's solutions are all more expensive than just delivering the spam? If we accept that the true issue behind spam is the theft of the resources associated with its transit - resources with real cash value - then how much theft is not a problem? At what point does theft get to be a problem? If you saddle the ISPs with responsibility for the problem, the problem of spam is exacerbated, not mitigated. Everything an ISP has to do to your mail before finally passing it to you can only increase their costs, which, in the end, must increase the end users' cost. It's far cheaper for the ISP to just deliver the mail. I submit that the only way to end the true problem of spam is to stop it from ever being sent, so that ISPs and their users never accrue the cost associated with its transit. I just don't have any clue how to do that. _______________________________________________ spamcon-general mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.spamcon.org/mailman/listinfo/spamcon-general#subscribers Subscribe, unsubscribe, etc: Use the URL above or send "help" in body of message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Contact administrator: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
