From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)

I want to clarify some points about my earlier posting on how remailer fees fix the "anonymous flooding" problem which Marc Ringuette mentioned.

Implicit in my comments were some assumptions which I ought to break out separately:

* The current Internet, glorious as it is, is not the likely long term solution. The various bans and constraints on business interactions, on fees, on commercial use, etc., are major limits to what we're talking about here. (Some alternatives exist, like Alternet (sp?), but Internet is what most of us are now using.)

Alternet is part of the Internet. There is no central control on the internet -- only on segments of it. UUCP is even more anarchic...

* The Internet policy statements are often invoked by sysadmins and would-be censors (David Sternlight comes to mind) who are worried about uses, abuses, and out of the ordinary situations. Ditto for Prodigy and similar systems. The talk about bans on anonymous mail (nothing seriously proposed, so far as I know) reflect the government-dominated nature of the current Internet.

The NSF NET has policy statements. There are no policies for the internet and indeed given that the internet spans at least thirty or so national jurisidictions and tens of thousands of different networks its impossible to have one policy statment. The risk is that Al Gore and Company will manage to ram through their goverment managed internet which would put PSI and company out of business and which would permanently assure that most traffic passes through zones with draconian policies. Perry