Forwarded message:
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 22:36:38 -0800 From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com> Subject: Re: Should the Feds ban spam? (fwd)
At 16:36 -0600 2/15/98, Jim Choate wrote:
Newspaper editors work according to policies and trusts empowered by the owners of the paper. They are allowed as a function of the views of the owners to express that choice as an *employee* of those owners. Those policies do not apply to the readers as would happen in the case of an ISP. Unless you propose that each person should have multiple accounts at multiple ISP's.
At 06:43 PM 2/15/98 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
This is so incoherent that it's not possible to turn into a positive statement.
It means the employee's of the paper act as agents of the owners and not as direct right-holders of the paper itself. In other word the job of the editor, not his civil right as an owner, is what gives them the privilige at the behest of the owners to edit what appears in the paper. The only people who have a right to 'freedom of the press' are the people who *own* the press. Employees don't have rights, per se, in this only duties and responsibilities to carry out the desires of the owners. Now if we address the issue, as some proposed, of ISP's having 'global filtering' rules (eg "All cyberpromo.com accounts are filtered") *and* the purchaser may for some reason *want* to recieve cyberpromo.com traffic they are left with the only option of going to a second (or third, or ...) ISP in order to get what they want.
I found it pretty easy to parse, though incorrect - Jim assumes that each person will only deal with one ISP,
Not at all, I assume that people can deal with as many ISP's as they have money for. What I do assume is that if we expect ISP's to filter spam they have only a single option open to them. That option is to impliment a filtering policy based upon an interview and oversight by the purchasers of that account. This will increase the costs of Internet access far above the current levels. This increase in cost will naturaly strain already limited budgets and force some people to drop secondary (or tertiary, or ...) accounts because of this basic access price increase.
and that getting spam filtering from that ISP means turning over control of all your incoming mail/news to the ISP.
Not at all, the purchaser defines a spam policy that the ISP impliments. Whatever filtering the recipient wants to do over and above this is left unremarked. However, for an ISP to filter ones email to determine if it fits the policy the purchaser/recipient has defined they *will* be required to review *all* incoming mail. Otherwise how do they determine if it fits one of the categories that were defined in the contract, whether we look at it from the perspective of what to filter or what to pass along and let the customer process on their own. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | When a man assumes a public trust, he should | | consider himself public property. | | | | Thomas Jefferson | | | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage@ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|