Responses to "Spam costs and questions" (long)
Yesterday I forwarded questions about spam from a friend who was speaking before the FTC next week. Here are most of the replies I received, which I've attached below. Some may have appeared here already. From: glee harrah cady <glee@netcom.com> From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com> From: Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org> From: Robert Moskowitz <rgm3@chrysler.com> From: "Halpert, James - DC" <jhalpert@pipermar.com> From: Azeem Azhar <aja@economist.com> From: Mark Grant <mark@unicorn.com> From: Charlie Stross <charlie@public.antipope.org> From: Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com> From: "Shabbir J. Safdar" <shabbir@vtw.org> From: djones@insight.dcss.McMaster.CA (David Jones) From: wyang@ktel.osc.edu From: clinton@annoy.com (Clinton at Annoy) From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com> From: Ray Everett-Church <ray@everett.org> From: Chris Poupart <jyhad@odyssee.net> From: "Marius Loots" <MLOOTS@medic.up.ac.za> From: Roger Bohn <Rbohn@UCSD.edu> -Declan *********** Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 15:26:33 -0700 (PDT) From: glee harrah cady <glee@netcom.com> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> A large amount of real costs are principally being borne not by the individual recipient but by the networks that are being abused in the process, which costs the users of the networks involved. Lots of spammers are not using "their own" networks to send out the spam, but using the open nature of the Internet to relay the messages off the mail servers of networks throughout the world. One really egregious instance of which I've been told is that someone used a mailserver in New Zealand as a relay for a large spam. I've heard that data charges in New Zealand are for info in AND out, the provider had to pay for the privilege. SInce this was a third-hand story, I can't cite you chapter and verse -- wish I could. When lots of spam hits a single network, email processing for all customers, whether or not they are recipients of that particular spam, is slowed. Lots of networks have this problem. Unlike email systems that stored one copy of an email, regardless of the number of recipients, the systems we're using on the Internet today send real physical bits for each message that take up space on mail queues. This, too, inhibits email of all involved. Then, folks have to deal with the fact that the spam is on their network: tech support folks are paid to answer queries about it, sysadmins are paid to toss it out (in cases where it hits large intranets -- one company local to here has two sysadmins that do nothing but get rid of spam coming into their local net) or to manage the disk space required to store the stuff. Smaller providers are getting killed with the stuff. The reason that many of us provider-types find more to like the Torricelli approach is that it goes after the deceptive practices that make it harder for us all to trace the sources of the spam: the hiding behind false or not accurate domain names; the hiding of the actual email address of the spammer; the harvesting of names and addresses from the open directories of whitepage services or of online providers, etc. This approach, we think will be more effective at getting to the root of the problem than labelling speech. After all, it's not only commercial speech that is being sent as spam and it's not responsible marketers who are doing it either. I'm not sure that legislation is actually needed to address the problem. I could make an argument that said that the deceptive practices that are making it difficult to go after the spammers actually fall into the purview of the FTC. I am concerned that we don't legislate something that we'll really be sorry about later. As usual, summarizing a complex and difficult policy and operational issue in one short email probably causes problems, too. I hope I've not left out anything, but probably I did. Ask if what I've said isn't clear. :-) ____________________________ glee harrah cady Manager, Public Policy, NETCOM +1.408.881.3227 1.800.NETCOM-1 glee@netcom.com co-author, _Mastering the Internet_, Sybex, 1995 & 1996 ********* Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 23:39:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Here's a cost that's seldomly counted: the occasionally useful spam that we delete without reading because most spam are simply garbage. I would argue that any spam protection system that does not allow useful spam to get through is flawed. ********* From: Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org> To: declan@well.com Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 16:22:12 -0700 (PDT) Cc: fight-censorship-announce@vorlon.mit.edu, mech@eff.org (Stanton McCandlish) Feel free to send this to FC, etc. This response does not constitute and official EFF position, but I believe it acurately reflects thinking here that will become EFF position shortly. Declan McCullagh typed:
A friend who's going to be on one of the FTC panels next week sent me a few questions about spam. Does anyone want to try their hand at answering them? I'll forward along all responses I get.
What are the costs to consumers of unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it takes to delete it might be one, hard drive space might be another. I would
ALL/MULTIPLE USERS * cost of storage (ISP, user or both, depending on mail system) in disk space and memory (remember it takes RAM to load a mailbox into any modern email program). * severe degradation and sometimes destruction of forums as they are over-run by spammage. * reputational harm and loss of all usefulness of Internet account (after being subject to a spammer's header forgery listing the innocent victim as the sender, who then receives all the hatemail the spamming generates). INDIVIDUAL END USER ADDITIONAL COSTS * time to read/examine * time to delete * time to filter * time to unsubscribe, complain, or otherwise respond * increased ISP/online service subscription fees as provider costs are passed on to customers. * per byte, per minute or per message costs from ISP (not all users) * per minute costs from phone or other conduit provider (not all users) CORPORATE END USER ADDITIONAL COSTS * lost productivity due to time sinks mentioned above, frustration, etc. * missed opportunities, deadlines, etc., due to too much mail to sort thru resulting in important messages being missed. Major potential for corporate lossage here. CORPORATE ADMINISTRATOR ADDL. COSTS * time (often quite a lot) filtering dependent users' mail, blocking spamming sites, contending with filled up disks, and other wastes of stafftime due to spamming. ISP/ONLINE SERVICE ADDL. COSTS * Help desk and admins' time filtering/blocking by customer request (not all sites do this) * Help desk and admins' time filtering/blocking by necessity to prevent exceedingly abusive spammers sucking up all available disk space * admins' time in cleanup after one of their users engages is spamming or is perceived to have done so due to forged headers, and 1000s of angry victims send in complaints, threats, etc. * company's losses in market share and reputation after one of their users engages is spamming or is perceived to have done so due to forged headers * admins' time in cleanup after one of their users engages is spamming or is perceived to have done so due to forged headers, and 10s or more of angry victims become vigilantes, and hack the provider, SYN flood them, send them crippling emailbombs, etc. * company's losses in mkt. share and reputation after their service slows, crashes or otherwise is negatively affected by such attacks. * company's liability when other subscribers sue for breach of contract, for return of subscription fees, etc., due to such outtages or degradation of service * CEO & legal staff time researching if any recourse is available. * increased connectivity costs as 56K, T1, etc. high-speed connections are not fast enough to keep up with all the spam (e.g. it is currently physically impossible to carry a full "Big 8" and alt Usenet feed with only a T1 connection [verify with a major ISP if in doubt], largely due to the amount of spamming in the alt groups. * increased staffing costs as more people have to be hired or consulted to deal with the problems caused by spammers. Please feel free to send suggestions for addtions to this list, which I've made for other purposes than answering Declan's query. Remember that TIME = MONEY and RESOURCES = MONEY in all above formulations.
like to know how to quantify it, and
compare it with the cost of sending e-mail.
It costs roughly $20 for Net access[*], plus the cost of a spamming-targeted mailing list ($50?) to send multiple millions of messages. [Actually this is not really true - unless AOL has changed the capabilities of its trial accounts, it actaully costs NOTHING to set up a temporary account that is capable of massive spammage. Worse yet, the technology to MAKE massive email lists is trivially available and/or creatable, so one does not even have to buy such a list. ZERO cost at all.)
If you banned commercial e-mail, wouldn't it just affect legitimate commercial transactions? That is to say, wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme builders still be able to spam? I would think that if they are so untraceable that it's hard to block their spam that it wouldn't really matter if it were simply made illegal.
Certainly. There are many other problems: 1) Any ban is going to be very difficult to write in a way that will survive constitutional scrutiny. 2) Banning all commercial email is obvioulys stupid and unconstitutional - I have a First Amendment right to receive commercial messages if I want to. 3) Banning all unsolicited email is obviously stupid and unconstitutional - I have a First Amendment right right to tell IBM that I like their web page, even if they didn't ask me for my comments. 4) Banning all commercial unsolicited email is obviously stupid and arguably unconstitutional. I probably have a right to send you a message offering my product if something in an email or a post or web page by you indicated you might be interested in what I'm offering. Additionally, such a ban does not speak to the issue - commerciality is not the problem. Religious and political rants are, to most people, an even more offensive form of spamming that advertisements are. 5) Despite the optimism of some, no local (i.e. national) law will ever stop spam, it will simply move spammers off-shore. That fewer respondents will buy, due to distrust of foreign merchants, is irrelevant - the spamming business model is successful if only 1 out of a million people makes a purchase, because there are essentially no costs. 6) All such bans attack content. This makes them presumptively unconstitutional right from the start. The issue of spamming cannot be solved with a ban. Spamming as a problem is divisible into TWO problems: a) Theft, abuse or usurpation of resources owned by specific parties (i.e. ISP connectivity, staff time, etc., and your productivity), or owned by everyone (tragedy of the commons). This is a matter of the right to not be forced to bear the costs of another's expression (a component of the right to freedom of speech and press), with shades of the right to use public resources (i.e. offline if some bully, every time you try to go a public park, blocks your entrance into the park, you can get an injunction against this person. Hard to map this kind of thing to the offline world though, on legal grounds even if the ethics of the situation are plain as day.) b) Violation of the recipient's right to be left alone (a component of the right to privacy) and right to not be forced to read another's expression (a component of the right to free speech and press). Spammers love to contort this last into another *almost* opposite right - the right to speak freekly in public even if it offends someone. They avoid the issue of not having a right to do this in private spaces, and not having a right to force others to bear their costs even for public expression. Anyway, the privacy and freedom to not read issues seem to apply principally if not only to private email, while the arguments in point a) seem to apply to private mail, and forums (mailing lists, newsgroups). These two problems require different solutions (and probably in fact both require combinations of several different solutions, ranging from class action suits to fraud prosecution to better filters to increased system security to prevent forgery to tighter users contract to "don't route spamming ISP's traffic" agreements between ISPs and NSPs, etc., etc.) EFF is forming a working group to try to size up the various options and possible solutions and see which ones are viable, which ones are best for rights and for the Internet, which are expedient but would harm the public interest, which are unconstitutional or otherwise bad, and so on. We also have to look at this beyond the here-and-now. What about ISPs that in the fine print say they sell their entire user base's contact info to e-marketers? What about the use of "push" technology for spam-like purposes? What about a MoU between all backbones and major NSPs to simply drop service to any "spammer haven" ISP? What about calls for direct regulation by the FTC or FCC? Or by a UN body? Many proposals are flying, many problems envisioned (and some being missed by most), and many people are getting increasingly hysterical about this so we need to find some solutions quickly. None of the legislation produced so far does anything but cause more damage. -- Stanton McCandlish mech@eff.org Electronic Frontier Foundation Program Director http://www.eff.org/~mech +1 415 436 9333 x105 (v), +1 415 436 9333 (f) Are YOU an EFF member? http://www.eff.org/join ********* Date: Thu, 05 Jun 1997 06:52:36 -0400 To: declan@relay.pathfinder.com, From: Robert Moskowitz <rgm3@chrysler.com> Morning Declan. In today's Internet charging scheme, there are two costs to the Internet consumer: Time to retrieve mail, and time to process scams. The first will fade as higher bandwidth solutions come into play. The later may never fade. Most users are not email savy, even if their email software is. People do dumb things like post to USENET groups and then get on the big spam lists, further increasing their mail filtering efforts. But let's put this into perspective. Today, I might send 5 - 10 minutes everyday, sorting through my USMail. Now I am a good recycler, and I open everyone and put all of the papers into the proper bins; some days this can take me 20 minutes. Despite my Eudora Pro filters that color flag suspected spams (I don't delete them, the filters might be in error) for easy delete, I have dozens of emails among my hunderds of messages to read before trashing. Maybe 5 - 10 minutes a day. I really do not think spam is all that bad unless.... What I have discovered is that recreational email, ie use of USENET and recreational LISTSERVs is the way that people get on spam lists. Us techies thus may have a very low spam to message ratio. But poor johnQpub, naively posts to alt.rec.sailboats and then gets 100 spams a day semi-related to sailing (Sherri would LOVE to go sailing with you...). Interestingly, the answer to spam is NOT filters to block it, but filters to move ligitamate mail into folders for processing and leave your IN box for quick scan/trashing. Thus the cost of spam to the user is education and GOOD (read not free) email software. Now the cost to mail handlers is different, but they can and should fight back. Look at the lawsuit by flowers.com. Tracy and her husband run a small time operation. The spam that used their domain name as the reply-to cost them time and business. They are going after the kid. This is costing them, but it will get them on a list of 'do not spam' sights, we hope. Robert Moskowitz Chrysler Corporation (810) 758-8212 ********* From: "Halpert, James - DC" <jhalpert@pipermar.com> Date: Wed, 04 Jun 97 17:00:00 DST Declan, Very high volume spam can and does burden service providers' systems. Remember the cost of sending a million or so e-mails is very low, but engineering a network to handle, say, 200,000 improperly addressed e-mails that collect on a service provider's mail server costs a good deal more. Herein lies an economic problem. This is not to say that the Constitution shouldn't be sacrificed on the altar of an economic problem, but the concern about high volume spam should not be dismissed as trivial. -- Jim Halpert ********* Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 00:10:54 +0100 To: declan@well.com From: Azeem Azhar <aja@economist.com> Declan, Here are a variety of costs: 1. phone costs (non-us) 2. traffic costs (if you are one of the customers on metered useage that e.g. UUnet and BBNplanet offer) 3. hard-drive costs (my mac crashed a few weeks ago losing data in another application because an incoming e-mail took up my last bit of drive space. technically myu fault, i know, but a cost nonetheless.) 4. my time (to write and check anti-spam filters. it took me over an hour to construct a good system in eudora. my charge out rate is GBP100 an hour, minimum 8 hours.) 5. CPU time on mail-relays on the way. e-mail *does* impose a measurable load on an SMTP host. Azeem Azeem Azhar vx: +44 171 830 7133 The Economist fx: +44 171 681 1358 25 St James Street e-mail: aja@economist.com London SW1A 1HG www: http://www.economist.com/ Disclaimer: The views expressed in this email do not necessarily represent those of my employer. ********* Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 02:43:02 -0700 (PDT) From: Mark Grant <mark@unicorn.com> To: declan@well.com
What are the costs to consumers of unsolicited e-mail?
Up to 150k of disk space, up to about 50 seconds of connect time for those who download it by modem (assuming 28.8k), a few seconds of time to delete it or a few minutes to send complaint mail back to their ISP. Worse is the indirect cost to consumers through the hassle it causes to their ISPs. They need faster links and more powerful mail servers to process the extra unwanted data and take time to install filters and deal with spammers. I've already had one spammer send out mail with a false unicorn.com return address which took a day of my time to sort out.
If you banned commercial e-mail, wouldn't it just affect legitimate commercial transactions?
Of course. Banning it is dumb and will cause all sorts of unexpected problems. A few class-action suits should eliminate most of them. Mark (postmaster@unicorn.com) ********* Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 11:02:49 +0100 (BST) From: Charlie Stross <charlie@public.antipope.org> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Declan McCullagh wrote:
What are the costs to consumers of unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it takes to delete it might be one, hard drive space might be another.
Those are minimal. Here in the UK, there are NO free local phone calls (unless you're lucky enough to live in Hull, or have a cableco who want to let you yack to your neighbours - it's a long and boring story). Furthermore, if you receive email via SMTP or UUCP (rather than via a mailbox reader protocol like POP3 or whatever) you can't filter the junk out before it reaches you. Thus, receiving spam costs money, in terms of dialup connect time. Moreover, some spammers use really poor, munged, address lists; I've seen 100Kb mails (a couple of minutes of download time on an old 14.4K modem, which is what many people still use) with maybe a 1K payload at the end of the headers. Given that I've got three or four users on my dialup site, and we get an average of 5 UCEs/person/day, it's probably costing us 5-15 pence/day extra on the phone bill. Not significant for _one_ site, but if you multiply by two million (est. number of UK internet users) you get a plague that's costing about 20 million UK pounds/year -- to the unwilling victims. This is before you factor in the online services like Compuserve or CIX that charge per unit connect time, or charge for mail received from the internet. The real victims, though, are the people whose addresses the spammers bung in the Reply-to: fields, so that they get mailbombed by indignant recipients. -- Charlie Stross ********* Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 23:17:10 -0700 To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>, cypherpunks@toad.com From: Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com> At 12:45 PM -0700 6/4/97, Declan McCullagh asked:
What are the costs to consumers of unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it takes to delete it might be one, hard drive space might be another. I would like to know how to quantify it, and compare it with the cost of sending e-mail.
I don't think the costs of the 1-3 spam messages I get each day is significant. (But I don't post to Usenet.)
If you banned commercial e-mail, wouldn't it just affect legitimate commercial transactions? That is to say, wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme builders still be able to spam? I would think that if they are so untraceable that it's hard to block their spam that it wouldn't really matter if it were simply made illegal.
Can you say regulatory arbitrage? The current social controls on spam are good enough that no one with any positive reputation wants to have anything to do with it. This means that spammers have to use anonymous offshore answering services. The widespread hatred of spam and spammers should keep the total amount under control without the legal action and in spite of the very low cost of spamming. The recent problems Spamford has been having with denial of service attacks is just one example of the social control process. The flood of hostile email spammers who include real email addresses receive are another. Legitimate commercial email does not evoke these strong reactions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | The Internet was designed | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | to protect the free world | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | from hostile governments. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA ********* Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 16:15:27 -0400 To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>, fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu From: "Shabbir J. Safdar" <shabbir@vtw.org> The combined EF-Florida/EFF-Austin/VTW filings for the FTC workshop will contain an exhaustive examination of the costs associated with junk email and the technology paradigms for addressing it. It's a technology paper, and doesn't take any particular political agenda. -S ********* Date: Wed, 4 Jun 97 16:11:58 EDT From: djones@insight.dcss.McMaster.CA (David Jones)
What are the costs to consumers of unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it takes to delete it might be one, hard drive space might be another. I would like to know how to quantify it, and compare it with the cost of sending e-mail.
To many people, the cost of spam is simply the time and tedium wasted deleted unwanted messages. Pretty minimal. A burdensome set of regulatory restrictions would also be an annoyance as people waste time and effory making sure reasonable email correspondence "complies" with the new rules. To some users of certain online services, they must pay for email messages or disk space and must pay for connect time. In these cases, there is a real and measurable monetary cost of spam. I'm sorry, I can't quantify that for you. At the organizational level, some companies may pay for Internet traffic bandwidth. If a significant fraction of the traffic is wasted on spam (actually I *really* doubt this is the case) then it could be calculated.
If you banned commercial e-mail, wouldn't it just affect legitimate commercial transactions? That is to say, wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme builders still be able to spam? I would think that if they are so untraceable that it's hard to block their spam that it wouldn't really matter if it were simply made illegal.
Hang on. A true "pyramid scheme" requires the victims to send money to the folks operating the scheme. Therefore, they can't be entirely anonymous ... or they'd never be able to cash in! Banning "commercial email" is just nuts. Should we also ban "business-related email" ? Or "advertising email" ? .... or what about "political advertising on the Net" ?? The Canadian government just made the front page of HotWired's online magazine for being foolish enough to ban certain political advertisements on the Net. Surely the U.S. won't make the same mistake. -- David Jones, PhD president, Electronic Frontier Canada -- djones@efc.ca ********* Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 18:15:59 -0400 (EDT) From: wyang@ktel.osc.edu To: declan@well.com Hi. I run a Free-Net -- a community outreach project of the Ohio State University and the Ohio Supercomputer Center, which gives free access to anyone who lives in our service area (we're serving about 20,000 people right now -- I understand that, in our service area, Compuserve only has about 12,000 customers). I don't read the censorship fighting list, but someone who does forwarded me your message. I don't know about user costs... but I do know about network-level (provider-level) costs. Disk space is only PART of the computational problem. There's also the swallowing of network bandwidth, and the drain on compute resources (CPU/RAM). My site normally carries about 25,000 unique message ID's per day. Our estimates (these are eyeball numbers, not based on hard-and-fast numbers) make it look as though 10% to 20% of those messages are spam. That's ten to twenty percent of our e-mail operation cost being immediately put toward spam. Beyond that, our users complain about spam. A lot. Right now, about an hour of my time every day is spent dealing with spam complaints (about other sites spamming us, mind). That's 1/8th of my work time, with a massive opportunity cost (as well as a real cost). The other staff members are *also* getting similar time drains. We currently estimate that between $500 and $2000 per month is completely lost to spammers -- funds redirected away from our community outreach/service mission, SUBSIDIZING COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS which generally do not enrich our community. That monthly cost is being drained out of a very small ($150k - $200k per year) project budget which is only getting smaller because people only donate to our donation-driven budget when they like what's going on, and they don't like spam. You might try to call it the cost of doing business... except for the fact that I'm not a normal network carrier. I'm a Free-Net, one of those community-minded sites that's trying to make sure that access to the informational wealth on the Internet is available at price that everyone can afford (free). Universal access is being threatened by this kind of activity, which has a massive user-level costs and implications. Most Free-Nets are incapable of handling the constant barrage of spam, and the complaints they generate.
If you banned commercial e-mail, wouldn't it just affect legitimate commercial transactions? That is to say, wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme builders still be able to spam? I would think that if they are so untraceable that it's hard to block their spam that it wouldn't really matter if it were simply made illegal.
Everything can be traced on the 'net. The question is what the cost of tracing it is going to be. You need to remember that there's virtually NO cost associated with *sending* spam. ISP connectivity costs, maybe bandwidth metering for a couple of messages. Those messages, however, can be expanded (1:1,000,000 kinds of ratios are potentially possible; one message can theoretically generate a MILLION spam messages; in practice, I've seen 1:10,000 ratios). The networks that carry the traffic are taking that computational and network-bandwidth cost. And they get hit by complaints from their users. I recognize that no matter what the law is going to do, you're not going to *stop* spam. The issue is to reduce the volume of spam enough to make sure that the cost is reduced to acceptable and absorbable cost-levels. That may mean making spamming tools such as "e-mail blaster" criminal tools. Free speech is great... but it's only free when it's not invasive into the rights of others. Spam *is* invasive, and there are clear, acceptable, and frankly more effective alternative methods for communicating commercial messages. -Bill System Manager, Lead System Administrator The Greater Columbus Free-Net ******** From: clinton@annoy.com (Clinton at Annoy) To: "'declan@well.com'" <declan@well.com> It is vital to distinguish between "unsolicited email" and "spam". Spam is essentially considered mass e-mailing for commercial purposes, (usually such as the selling of a product or service). If "unsolicited e-mail" is rendered illegal, what will happen to someone who mistakenly sends an email to the wrong address? It's like prosecuting someone for dialing the wrong number. What about a deliberately targeted, but unsolicited email that is crafted to express displeasure to a politician, for instance? To be potentially prosecuted on such a basis could (and will) place a severe chill on the rights of people to communicate freely with elected officials - the cornerstone of democracy. A protocol to deal with spamming is by no means unwelcome, but to confuse it with unsolicited email is potentially very dangerous. Especially with a government so intent on censoring the free flow of information and thought. Perhaps the first place to start would be to clearly define spam. Clinton Fein Publisher and Editor annoy.com ************* From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com> Subject: Re: Spam costs and questions To: declan@well.com Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 14:09:42 -0700 (PDT) Declan McCullagh writes:
A friend who's going to be speaking on one of the FTC panels next week sent me a few questions about spam. Does anyone want to try their hand at answering them? I'll forward along all responses I get.
What are the costs to consumers of unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it takes to delete it might be one, hard drive space might be another. I would like to know how to quantify it, and compare it with the cost of sending e-mail.
Also there's the cost of network transport of spam, both from the spammer's host to the recipient's ISP, and from the ISP to the recipients PC. The last is often the worst, as it eats up time the victim could be using to do something productive. In addition, most spam is bounced through an innocent third party who has a good network connection, like a university. Sending out a lot of spam takes much bandwidth, so the spammer steals the bandwidth and processing power from the innocent third party.
If you banned commercial e-mail, wouldn't it just affect legitimate commercial transactions? That is to say, wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme builders still be able to spam? I would think that if they are so untraceable that it's hard to block their spam that it wouldn't really matter if it were simply made illegal.
Spammers need to have a way that you can respond to them. Since spam is legal, and they don't want email in return, they include phone numbers, fax numbers, or snail-mail addresses for people to reply to. If spam were illegal, then spammers could be tracked via the phone numbers. It's only the email's return path that's difficult to trace- spam, because it is selling something, must have a way for potential customers to respond. Most of the purported 'anti-spam' legislation is thinly-disguised LEGITIMIZATION of spam!! Anything that puts the burden on ISPs or recipients to filter out 'tagged' messages legitimizes spam. As annoying as spam is, I would much prefer that nothing be done rather than a poorly-thought-out law. So far, all the proposed laws I have seen have had flaws in them that make me unable to support them. To be honest, I can not myself come up with a law that I would find acceptable. It's a hard problem. -- Eric Murray ericm@lne.com Privacy through technology! Network security and encryption consulting. PGP keyid:E03F65E5 *********** Date: Wed, 4 Jun 97 16:10:07 -0400 From: Ray Everett-Church <ray@everett.org> To: "Declan McCullagh" <declan@well.com>, <fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu> On 6/4/97 3:44 PM, Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) wrote:
A friend who's going to be speaking on one of the FTC panels next week sent me a few questions about spam. Does anyone want to try their hand at answering them? I'll forward along all responses I get.
What are the costs to consumers of unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it takes to delete it might be one, hard drive space might be another. I would like to know how to quantify it, and compare it with the cost of sending e-mail.
I also will be speaking at the FTC next week and address that question in my FTC filing which can be seen at <http://www.smart.net/~everett/comment.html> The short version of the answer is that UCE is difficult to assign a clear cost to in part because it is spread over such an ever widening base that the more people you spam, the harder it is to know where the costs are concentrated. However there are costs to the bandwidth provider for the site originating the spam in terms of consumed bandwidth, there's also costs of consumed bandwidth leading into every site that receives the mail. Once it arrives at an ISP, there are costs in terms of the CPU time and system efficiency issues, and disk space consumed, and costs for the consumers who may have to spend more time and money (if they pay on a metered basis) to download and sort through the stuff. It's hard to quantify in dollars and cents, but lets look at the quantities we're talking about. AOL has publically estimated that they process about 30 million pieces of email a day and further they've publically estimated that 40-45% of that is spam. I recently sampled 3 days of my regular spam load and the average piece was a hair over 5000 bytes. 5k * 13 million messages, you're talking roughly 65 million kilobytes a day. (somebody please correct my math... i'm a lawyer not an accountant). Since people don't read their email every day, some of that must be stored for several days. And if it is bouncing back to an invalid sender address, the rest ends up in the postmaster mailbox. Assuming that those same figures and costs are spread among other ISPs as well, that's a heck of a lot of data to transmit and store...which translates into costs for ISPs and their customers.
If you banned commercial e-mail, wouldn't it just affect legitimate commercial transactions? That is to say, wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme builders still be able to spam? I would think that if they are so untraceable that it's hard to block their spam that it wouldn't really matter if it were simply made illegal.
I don't think anybody wants to ban all commercial mail, just the unsolicited advertisements for which the advertisers don't bear the real costs. If you're truly trying to operate a moneymaking business, you've got to have someplace for people to send the money... So regardless of how you disguise the headers, you still have a means of tracking down the culprit... and in the case of the Smith legislation you'd have the chance to recover up to $1500 per message. There is at least one major national collection agency that I know of who is chomping at the bit to recover that for you. -Ray <everett@cauce.org> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ray Everett-Church, Esq. <ray@everett.org> www.everett.org/~everett This mail isn't legal advice. Opinion(RE-C) != Opinion(clients(RE-C)) (C)1997 Ray Everett-Church ** Help outlaw "spam"=> http://www.cauce.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ******** Date: Wed, 04 Jun 1997 19:20:36 -0400 From: Chris Poupart <jyhad@odyssee.net> To: declan@well.com <quote> If you banned commercial e-mail, wouldn't it just affect legitimate commercial transactions? That is to say, wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme builders still be able to spam? I would think that if they are so untraceable that it's hard to block their spam that it wouldn't really matter if it were simply made illegal. </quote> making spam illegal would be a futile plan, unless the authorities were given the power to persue not just the sender, but the people for whome it advertises. Not only could the fly-by-night pyramid-schemes work, but there are programs out there that allow you to route your e-mail so that it is Anonymous, now these programs can also do bulk mailing... I think you get my picture. If you could also press charges against the advertised company (providing it was authorised by them), then that might work. If not, well then with all the free e-mail available (www.hotmail.com and www.netaddress.com or .net I can't remember), people might want to set up an e-mail account to use with Usenet and to give as pw, ect, and then they could keep one privit and "secret" amongst their friends. The internet has flourished w/out government help and I beleive that it will continiue to do so. Chris Poupart Montreal, Canada -- Chris Poupart mailto:chris@peacefire.org Support Freedom of Speech and visit: http://www.peacefire.org | http://www.eff.org http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Field/6078/censor-index.html ********** From: "Marius Loots" <MLOOTS@medic.up.ac.za> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 11:16:21 GMT+2 Hallo Declan I really enjoy your list. The mailings are very interesting and relevant. Thanks. My thoughts on the two questions:
What are the costs to consumers of unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it takes to delete it might be one, hard drive space might be another. I would like to know how to quantify it, and compare it with the cost of sending e-mail.
It would be extremely difficult to quantify in monetary terms. It has been long since I had one of those BIG things in my mailbox. Most of these has lately been smaller emails that compare well in size to some of the material I send around. Because harddrives are not that expensive anymore, storage space is IMO, not a factor at all. The irritation factor is my biggest concern. You have to sort it from the valuable mail, that takes time. You have to delete it, that takes time. And some people has to download it, that takes time. This eating up of my time, irritates me. And with the present information overload, time is one of the few things we definitely don't have.
If you banned commercial e-mail, wouldn't it just affect legitimate commercial transactions? That is to say, wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme builders still be able to spam? I would think that if they are so untraceable that it's hard to block their spam that it wouldn't really matter if it were simply made illegal.
You are not going to be able to ban it. As long as email is email, there will be people using it to spam. Even if you make it illegal, it will still happen. A few quick thoughts or ideas to be kicked around: 1. What could be made illegal is the selling of email addresses. 2. Ban *unsolicited* commercial email 3. Make ISP who supply service for free or without proper checking liable for prosecution if spam comes from their system. 4. Black-list people that are caught spamming (use in tandem with 3). A number of these spammers are not once-only fly-by-nighters. They strike again and again. Because it is not illegal at the moment, no-one can do anything. I am not able to write the legalese but these are some rough thoughts on the matter. Unsolicited email is unsolicited email, and the sooner we get that out of the system, the better. Groetnis Marius Loots ------------------------------------------------------- Maestro mloots@medic.up.ac.za +27-12-319-2144 pgp2.6 TOP 50 on the SA WebChart - Have a look and vote NOW!!! http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6398 Add some Chaos to your Life and put the World in Order ------------------------------------------------------- ********* Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 13:28:38 -0700 To: declan@relay.pathfinder.com From: Roger Bohn <Rbohn@UCSD.edu> Subject: Re: Spam costs and questions At 3:47 PM -0400 6/4/97, Declan McCullagh wrote:
A friend who's going to be speaking on one of the FTC panels next week sent me a few questions about spam. Does anyone want to try their hand at answering them? I'll forward along all responses I get.
What are the costs to consumers of unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it takes to delete it might be one, hard drive space might be another. I would like to know how to quantify it, and compare it with the cost of sending e-mail.
A big cost is that it reduces the S/N ratio of e-mail. As the amount of spam goes up, sooner or later you start missing legitimate messages that you should have read, because you do blanket erases, don't read carefully, close down entire accounts, etc. Personally I've not reached that point, but spam is growing exponentially so I give it 2 years. Cost of telephone connect time is also a consideration for most users. Even if you are on a flat phone rate, there is an opportunity cost from having your phone tied up longer. (Yes, even if you have 2 lines--the members of my household are always fighting over the second line.)
If you banned commercial e-mail, wouldn't it just affect legitimate commercial transactions? That is to say, wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme builders still be able to spam? I would think that if they are so untraceable that it's hard to block their spam that it wouldn't really matter if it were simply made illegal.
Yes and no. Fly by nights would continue, certainly. But look how successful the mail fraud laws have been at limiting (not eradicating) mail based pyramid schemes, for example. Laws, if carefully drawn, would have an effect. I think mandatory labeling is much better than banning commercial e-mail, by the way. An outright ban has several problems, in the U.S. at least. A mandatory label deals with the S/N issue cited above (you can filter commercial messages), and as mail packages get smarter they can be set to not download messages selectively, thus dealing with the other problems. Something as draconian as an outright ban also encourages lawbreaking more than a labeling provision would. Roger Bohn ###
Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> writes:
Yesterday I forwarded questions about spam from a friend who was speaking before the FTC next week. Here are most of the replies I received, which I've attached below. Some may have appeared here already.
From: glee harrah cady <glee@netcom.com> From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com> From: Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org> From: Robert Moskowitz <rgm3@chrysler.com> From: "Halpert, James - DC" <jhalpert@pipermar.com> From: Azeem Azhar <aja@economist.com> From: Mark Grant <mark@unicorn.com> From: Charlie Stross <charlie@public.antipope.org> From: Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com> From: "Shabbir J. Safdar" <shabbir@vtw.org> From: djones@insight.dcss.McMaster.CA (David Jones) From: wyang@ktel.osc.edu From: clinton@annoy.com (Clinton at Annoy) From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com> From: Ray Everett-Church <ray@everett.org> From: Chris Poupart <jyhad@odyssee.net> From: "Marius Loots" <MLOOTS@medic.up.ac.za> From: Roger Bohn <Rbohn@UCSD.edu>
Declan didn't like what I wrote, so he deleted it. Good journalism. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
I believe I received your response after I compiled the list. I disagree with most of the folks below, but I included their positions nevertheless. (Anyway, I suspect we agree on spam.) -Declan On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> writes:
Yesterday I forwarded questions about spam from a friend who was speaking before the FTC next week. Here are most of the replies I received, which I've attached below. Some may have appeared here already.
From: glee harrah cady <glee@netcom.com> From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com> From: Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org> From: Robert Moskowitz <rgm3@chrysler.com> From: "Halpert, James - DC" <jhalpert@pipermar.com> From: Azeem Azhar <aja@economist.com> From: Mark Grant <mark@unicorn.com> From: Charlie Stross <charlie@public.antipope.org> From: Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com> From: "Shabbir J. Safdar" <shabbir@vtw.org> From: djones@insight.dcss.McMaster.CA (David Jones) From: wyang@ktel.osc.edu From: clinton@annoy.com (Clinton at Annoy) From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com> From: Ray Everett-Church <ray@everett.org> From: Chris Poupart <jyhad@odyssee.net> From: "Marius Loots" <MLOOTS@medic.up.ac.za> From: Roger Bohn <Rbohn@UCSD.edu>
Declan didn't like what I wrote, so he deleted it. Good journalism.
---
Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
Declan McCullagh <declan@pathfinder.com> writes:
I suspect we agree on spam.)
I kind of doubt it. Do you believe, as I do, that "spam" deserves the protection as any other kind of speech, and that so libel, child pornography, and bolb-making instructions? I didn't think so. :-) --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
So we do agree after all! -Declan (Who thinks that no consensual speech should be banned by the government. I can, however, see a common law argument for spam as trespass after repeated cease-and-desist notes are sent.) On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Declan McCullagh <declan@pathfinder.com> writes:
I suspect we agree on spam.)
I kind of doubt it.
Do you believe, as I do, that "spam" deserves the protection as any other kind of speech, and that so libel, child pornography, and bolb-making instructions?
I didn't think so. :-)
---
Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
Declan McCullagh <declan@pathfinder.com> writes:
-Declan
(Who thinks that no consensual speech should be banned by the government.
If you set up your mailbox to accept e-mail promiscuously from anyone, then anything sent to it is "consentual".
I can, however, see a common law argument for spam as trespass after repeated cease-and-desist notes are sent.)
The onus is on the recipient to filter out what they don't want (or to "filter in" only what they want, which is how I think we'll end up). Such filtering takes less time+effort than "repeated cease-and-desist notes". --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Declan McCullagh <declan@pathfinder.com> writes:
-Declan
(Who thinks that no consensual speech should be banned by the government.
If you set up your mailbox to accept e-mail promiscuously from anyone, then anything sent to it is "consentual".
I can, however, see a common law argument for spam as trespass after repeated cease-and-desist notes are sent.)
The onus is on the recipient to filter out what they don't want (or to "filter in" only what they want, which is how I think we'll end up). Such filtering takes less time+effort than "repeated cease-and-desist notes".
Is there any justification for a law that would require senders to make filtering easier, e.g., by attaching a [COMMERCIAL] tag to all UCEs. - Igor.
ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) writes:
Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Declan McCullagh <declan@pathfinder.com> writes:
-Declan
(Who thinks that no consensual speech should be banned by the government.
If you set up your mailbox to accept e-mail promiscuously from anyone, then anything sent to it is "consentual".
I can, however, see a common law argument for spam as trespass after repeated cease-and-desist notes are sent.)
The onus is on the recipient to filter out what they don't want (or to "filter in" only what they want, which is how I think we'll end up). Such filtering takes less time+effort than "repeated cease-and-desist notes".
Is there any justification for a law that would require senders to make filtering easier, e.g., by attaching a [COMMERCIAL] tag to all UCEs.
And if the recipient gets UCE without such tags, he can sue, right? As it is, there are a few dozen mentally disturbed folks who bombard postmasters everywhere with false reports of "spamming" and "warez". Now they'll complain about UCE without tags (w/o basis in reality) and threaten to sue. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
Such a law would be unconstitutional, I believe, and unjust. It's compelled speech: the government forcing you to say something. Depending on how it's worded, it could also impact core political speech, something the courts generally don't like. -Declan On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
Is there any justification for a law that would require senders to make filtering easier, e.g., by attaching a [COMMERCIAL] tag to all UCEs.
- Igor.
Declan McCullagh <declan@pathfinder.com> writes:
Such a law would be unconstitutional, I believe, and unjust. It's compelled speech: the government forcing you to say something. Depending on how it's worded, it could also impact core political speech, something the courts generally don't like.
On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
Is there any justification for a law that would require senders to make filtering easier, e.g., by attaching a [COMMERCIAL] tag to all UCEs.
The following rant has nothing to do with crypto. If anyone wants to talk about this (and I do hope Ross will will this of interest!), let's move this someplace more appropriate, like f-k. First, not all "unsolicited e-mail" is commercial. Suppose a Jew4Jesus writes a short perl script that collects the e-mail addresses of all the people who post to the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.jewish and various other Jewish-related forums, and e-mails them an unsolicited e-mail that goes: "Subject: Re: <original subject> Beloved friend and fellow Jew, I'm writing in response to your Usenet article <Message-Id> posted on <date> in newsgroup(s) <blah>. I believe that your soul will not be saved unless you accept Y'hoshua the Moshiah as your friend and personal savior blah blah Jesus is cumming and you better swallow!" [I chose J4J as an example because they're probably the most censored and persecuted group on the 'net today - more so than CoS or the Nazis :-) It could be a political candidate sending his campaign ad to hundreds of thousands of e-mail addresses - this has happened before. It could be an environmental organization calling for a boycott of some product or corporation] Under the law Igor proposed (and I understand "anto-spam" bills to this effect are floating around the various legislatures), this wouldn't need to be labelled "ad". "Voluntary" labelling can be made pretty much mandatory - like movie ratings and now TV show ratings, and Social Security "contributions" are "voluntary". You don't have to "voluntarily" label any article critical of the Klinton Administration as "seditious spam", but you can't find a backbone which doesn't require its ISPs to make it a part of their TOS. But we're not quite there yet. BTW, under Stanford Wallace's TOS, if the J4J neglected to run his mailing list through Stanford's "scrub" database, removing the addresses that don't want "bulk" e-mail, the poor J4J would probably be spanked hard. (See WWW.IEMMC.ORG. I'm not sure if this is right either.) Of course some people make a point of refusing to put their addresses on the "scrub" list, and then bitching when they get bulk e-mail, vecause they want all bulk e-mail to stop. Bulk e-mail professionals have their own blacklist of people who bitch, and try not to e-mail them even without their "remove" request. :-) Then again, what constitutes "bulk"? Suppose the J4J sent a single unsolicited prozelityzing e-mail to a single soc.culture.jewish poster, who goes ballistic. Or suppose the J4J posted a prozelityzing article in soc.culture.jewish, and someone sent him an e-mail in response, saying "Fuck you, hazer, please refrain from sliming s.c.j with your xian propaganda". "Harrassment" is a content-based judgment call, as is "commercial advertisement". Would a more polite request to "stay away from our Jewish newsgroup, please" be more kosher? Is it acceptable for a "politically correct" homosexual to send hate e-mail to the posters on alt.fan.rush-limbaugh with specific criticisms of their articles? Yes, the only honorable response to speech you don't like is to ignore it or to respond with more speech. Is it acceptable to send an e-mail flame directly to a poster in a moderated newsgroup if the flame has no chance of being approved by the moderator? (No, because there aren't any moderated newsgroups anymore :-) When an e-mail address is publicized (e.g. by posting to Usenet, or by having it mentioned in a Web page), it will get "unsolicited" e-mail from strangers - hopefully not "harrassing". A way out of it is to install filters that separate "stranger" e-mail from the e-mail from known parties. E.g., I might create a file that contained keywords that are of interest to me - names of friends, words like "crypto" or "freedom knights". Then I could have .procmailrc invoke grep, and if none of the keywords matched, put the e-mail in a special folder that I'd check once a week before emptying. (I could do the same with pure .procmailrc I suppose.) Anyway, I'm not doing this yet, but I think this is our future. By the way, today's address harvesters do much more than grep usenet headers for addresses for indiscriminate bulk e-mail. They not only go through Usenet articles and clean up the usual "anti-spam" manglings in the headers and bodies. They also crawl through Web pages, collecting everything that looks like e-mail addresses; they monitor IRC and collect e-mail addresses. They monitor mailing lists to the point of asking the listserv/majordomo for the list of lists it carries, then asking it for the list of subscribers to each list. Also instead of just building the biggest possible list of e-mail addresses, they build a targeted database, keeping track where a particular e-mail address was found. Suppose a person subscribes to a "porsche owners" mailing list, and goes to an investment- related channel on one of the IRC servers. In no time he'll be getting "junk e-mail" related to the interests he expressed - possibly even saying "I'm writing you because I saw you on the #invest channel on Tuesday, and I want to tell you about this hot new penny stock" These programs, vastly more sophisticated than the bulk mail of even a year ago, which just collected e-mail addresses from Usenet and e-mail them all indiscriminately, will drive the latter out. Why bother, when you can pay a very reasonable fee to a service bureau that will deliver your ad to an audeince that a) doesn't object to bulk e-mail, b) is bigger than what you would have gathered with primitive grep-like tools. Left to itself, the market will stabilize and the occasional unsolicited bulk e-mail will be even less of a nuisance than it is now. [One good use for UBE: suppose you've foolishly subscribed to an ISP like IDT - the crooks that provide shitty service and make it very hard to cancel - they just keep billing your credit card. One sure way to terminate one's account is to use it to "spam" Usenet or to send out a mass e-mail objecting to IDT's lousy service and content censorship.] Fuck the Usenet Cabal! --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
Declan McCullagh wrote:
Such a law would be unconstitutional, I believe, and unjust. It's compelled speech: the government forcing you to say something. Depending on how it's worded, it could also impact core political speech, something the courts generally don't like.
Declan, There is a lot of commercial compelled speech. For example, mutual funds must say that past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Do you find this kind of compelled speech unconstitutional? igor
On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
Is there any justification for a law that would require senders to make filtering easier, e.g., by attaching a [COMMERCIAL] tag to all UCEs.
- Igor.
- Igor.
ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) writes:
There is a lot of commercial compelled speech. For example, mutual funds must say that past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Do you find this kind of compelled speech unconstitutional?
(Is Black Unicorn reading this?) The purpose of the securities laws is not to protect the small investor (who gets fucked very thoroughly, thank you :-) but the large financial services firms with political connections. For example the requirement to put out the red herring for a non-trivial IPO is there not to protect the investors who buy in on the IPO, but to ensure that the syndicate that underwrites the IPO gets their 2+%. Ditto for the entire legal framework, including the U.S. Constitution and any other country's legal framework - its goal is to protect the (economic) interests of the ruling class, and whatever serves those interests is "constitutional". Inasmuch as free speech on the Internet threatens the murderous fascist dictatorship in Washington, DC, any restrictions on free speech are therefore "constitutional". You remind me, Igor, of a recent story I read in a paper which I already threw away, so I'll reconstruct it from memory, probably with mistakes: * a few folks from Long Island, not NASD registered,published an "investment advice" newsletter, distributed over the Internet and fax. Subscriptions cost >$1K/year. It was called something like "The Small-Cap Equity Speculator" (not exactly, my apologies, but "speculation" was definitely in the title) * Among the many penny stocks they discussed was some kind of a motorcycle manufacturer, whose name I forgot too. The newsletter recommended a buy based on their fundamentals analysis and potential sales. * Some of the folks who published the newsletter had a long position in the stock, which they apparently bought months before the recommendation for (gasp) $2,000 (two thousand dollars). * The newsletter had a disclaimer that the authors may hold positions in the stocks they're discussing [surprise!] * The motorcycle stock fell in price, and the readers who bet on it lost money - as did, I presume, the newsletter publishers. Some readers complained to the SEC, who's now trying to jail/fine the newsletter publishers. * I no longer have the paper, and it wasn't terribly clear, but it sounded like SEC was unhappy that a) they were trying to drive up the price of the stock they were long (with the intent to sell? :-) b) they incorrectly analyzed the fundamentals and were wrong to recommend a buy when the price in fact failed to go up (The sales were like 10% of what they hoped for) [Now if every amateur investment analyst who fucked up went to jail...] If this is true (and I may be missing important details), then why are these unfortunates any less worthy of our support than, say, Jim Bell? :-) Remind me some time to tell you in private e-mail of a few cases I witnessed when large, politically connected financial services firms engaged in conduct that would have landed you or me in jail - and it happens all the time. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) writes:
There is a lot of commercial compelled speech. For example, mutual funds must say that past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Do you find this kind of compelled speech unconstitutional?
(Is Black Unicorn reading this?)
The purpose of the securities laws is not to protect the small investor (who gets fucked very thoroughly, thank you :-) but the large financial services firms with political connections.
For example the requirement to put out the red herring for a non-trivial IPO is there not to protect the investors who buy in on the IPO, but to ensure that the syndicate that underwrites the IPO gets their 2+%.
Actually, if I am not mistaken, the big securities houses like JP Morgan objected very loudly when SEC was created in 1930s. They have probably adapted to the situation and manage to make a profit, but they probably adapt again if the regulations went away.
Ditto for the entire legal framework, including the U.S. Constitution and any other country's legal framework - its goal is to protect the (economic) interests of the ruling class, and whatever serves those interests is "constitutional". Inasmuch as free speech on the Internet
And so what follows from this statement?
threatens the murderous fascist dictatorship in Washington, DC, any restrictions on free speech are therefore "constitutional".
You remind me, Igor, of a recent story I read in a paper which I already threw away, so I'll reconstruct it from memory, probably with mistakes:
* a few folks from Long Island, not NASD registered,published an "investment advice" newsletter, distributed over the Internet and fax. Subscriptions cost >$1K/year. It was called something like "The Small-Cap Equity Speculator" (not exactly, my apologies, but "speculation" was definitely in the title)
* Among the many penny stocks they discussed was some kind of a motorcycle manufacturer, whose name I forgot too. The newsletter recommended a buy based on their fundamentals analysis and potential sales.
* Some of the folks who published the newsletter had a long position in the stock, which they apparently bought months before the recommendation for (gasp) $2,000 (two thousand dollars).
* The newsletter had a disclaimer that the authors may hold positions in the stocks they're discussing [surprise!]
* The motorcycle stock fell in price, and the readers who bet on it lost money - as did, I presume, the newsletter publishers. Some readers complained to the SEC, who's now trying to jail/fine the newsletter publishers.
* I no longer have the paper, and it wasn't terribly clear, but it sounded like SEC was unhappy that a) they were trying to drive up the price of the stock they were long (with the intent to sell? :-) b) they incorrectly analyzed the fundamentals and were wrong to recommend a buy when the price in fact failed to go up (The sales were like 10% of what they hoped for) [Now if every amateur investment analyst who fucked up went to jail...]
... Or a mature analyst. Anyway, almost all of them fuck up. There could be something else involved in that story, as it sounds, there is little to prosecute these guys for, as far as I understand.
If this is true (and I may be missing important details), then why are these unfortunates any less worthy of our support than, say, Jim Bell? :-)
Remind me some time to tell you in private e-mail of a few cases I witnessed when large, politically connected financial services firms engaged in conduct that would have landed you or me in jail - and it happens all the time.
I am interested. - Igor.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <199706071754.MAA01524@manifold.algebra.com>, on 06/07/97 at 12:54 PM, ichudov@Algebra.COM (Igor Chudov @ home) said:
There is a lot of commercial compelled speech. For example, mutual funds must say that past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Do you find this kind of compelled speech unconstitutional?
Well I don't know how Duncan feels about it but I think it's highly unconstutional. - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBM5qcNo9Co1n+aLhhAQFKXgQAiGRKXCDfuQ8/UBQtkucbG/MygYd3Gq51 EkGt6Kmp+mbz2wGhFcEYXrK34TYCmTmE6ThiB96UoB4Qsz7I2kmm4TCbR3/cP8/9 fl+eLHGfXaKu59g4s+7thCVCZXgHVbyrPLakYwIqj1n+Wtqp8ARHcgoAJXZP+I+N 59n7r3qg/aU= =2yF5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
I don't think commercial speech should be treated as second-class speech. But my position is hardly surprising. -Declan On Sun, 8 Jun 1997, William H. Geiger III wrote:
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In <199706071754.MAA01524@manifold.algebra.com>, on 06/07/97 at 12:54 PM, ichudov@Algebra.COM (Igor Chudov @ home) said:
There is a lot of commercial compelled speech. For example, mutual funds must say that past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Do you find this kind of compelled speech unconstitutional?
Well I don't know how Duncan feels about it but I think it's highly unconstutional.
- -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0
Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - ---------------------------------------------------------------
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"William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com> writes:
In <199706071754.MAA01524@manifold.algebra.com>, on 06/07/97 at 12:54 PM, ichudov@Algebra.COM (Igor Chudov @ home) said:
There is a lot of commercial compelled speech. For example, mutual funds must say that past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Do you find this kind of compelled speech unconstitutional?
Well I don't know how Duncan feels about it but I think it's highly unconstutional.
I can still publish a book and claim that borshch (Russian beet soup) cures cancer. However if I also offer to sell beets my mail order, the FDA can bite me. It's "constitutional" because it protects the olygopoly of the large drug companies with political connections. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
On Sun, Jun 08, 1997 at 08:42:49AM -0500, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
"William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com> writes:
In <199706071754.MAA01524@manifold.algebra.com>, on 06/07/97 at 12:54 PM, ichudov@Algebra.COM (Igor Chudov @ home) said:
There is a lot of commercial compelled speech. For example, mutual funds must say that past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Do you find this kind of compelled speech unconstitutional?
Well I don't know how Duncan feels about it but I think it's highly unconstutional.
I can still publish a book and claim that borshch (Russian beet soup) cures cancer. However if I also offer to sell beets my mail order, the FDA can bite me. It's "constitutional" because it protects the olygopoly of the large drug companies with political connections.
Drug regulation muddies the waters quite a bit -- the issue is commercial speech in general. And that issue is a more basic one -- some entity (the government, in this case) is designated as the "enforcer of contracts". Contracts are special documents that by their very nature involve "enforcement". What you say in a contract binds you. What you say outside of a contract does not. What you say in a contract is, therefore, and by definition, not "free". -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html
Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> writes:
On Sun, Jun 08, 1997 at 08:42:49AM -0500, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
"William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com> writes:
In <199706071754.MAA01524@manifold.algebra.com>, on 06/07/97 at 12:54 PM, ichudov@Algebra.COM (Igor Chudov @ home) said:
There is a lot of commercial compelled speech. For example, mutual funds must say that past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Do you find this kind of compelled speech unconstitutional?
Well I don't know how Duncan feels about it but I think it's highly unconstutional.
I can still publish a book and claim that borshch (Russian beet soup) cures cancer. However if I also offer to sell beets my mail order, the FDA can bite me. It's "constitutional" because it protects the olygopoly of the large drug companies with political connections.
Drug regulation muddies the waters quite a bit -- the issue is commercial speech in general. And that issue is a more basic one -- some entity (the government, in this case) is designated as the "enforcer of contracts". Contracts are special documents that by
Actually, in the European legal tradition, a prince/potentate only assumed the responsibility to enforce a contract if that was explicitly specified when the contract was entered, and often required a separate fee. (Similarly, treaties between sovereigns called on various deities to rnforce the contract.) In Russia during the Mongol times two folks could enter a contract and choose to have the prince of Kiev, or Vladimir, or Novgorod, or some other enforce it, and pay that prince a fee. Then one of the parties could sue in that prince's court. A curious system developed by the time the Russian gumbint got centralized around Moscow - tsar's court sold special stamped paper which could be used for contracts, promissory notes, etc. For a contract to be enforceable, it had to be written on this paper. Only those who entered contracts were paying for the upkeep of the enforcement mechanism. Note that it wasn't necessary to register the contract with the gubmint to make it enforceable (I think, this was a part of the stamp act in the colonies).
their very nature involve "enforcement". What you say in a contract binds you. What you say outside of a contract does not. What you say in a contract is, therefore, and by definition, not "free".
When a tobacco company says in an ad, "Joe Camel is cool", what kind of contractual obligations does it assume? Have you ever bought a used car, Kent? Have you seen the language in the contract that throws out whatever promises the saleguy made that are not a part of the contract? If I claim on Usenet that borshch cures cancer, who are the counterparties, and what consideration do I get? --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <19970608071045.57576@bywater.songbird.com>, on 06/08/97 at 07:10 AM, Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> said:
On Sun, Jun 08, 1997 at 08:42:49AM -0500, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote: > "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com> writes:
In <199706071754.MAA01524@manifold.algebra.com>, on 06/07/97 at 12:54 PM, ichudov@Algebra.COM (Igor Chudov @ home) said:
There is a lot of commercial compelled speech. For example, mutual funds must say that past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Do you find this kind of compelled speech unconstitutional?
Well I don't know how Duncan feels about it but I think it's highly unconstutional.
I can still publish a book and claim that borshch (Russian beet soup) cures cancer. However if I also offer to sell beets my mail order, the FDA can bite me. It's "constitutional" because it protects the olygopoly of the large drug companies with political connections.
Drug regulation muddies the waters quite a bit -- the issue is commercial speech in general. And that issue is a more basic one -- some entity (the government, in this case) is designated as the "enforcer of contracts". Contracts are special documents that by their very nature involve "enforcement". What you say in a contract binds you. What you say outside of a contract does not. What you say in a contract is, therefore, and by definition, not "free".
<sigh> Ofcource what I say in a contract is "free". I can say anything I want in a contract solong as the parties involved agree. What is controled is my actions not my speech. If I enter into a "contract" to provide borshch on the promise that it will cure your cancer *knowing* that it will not then I am guilty of fraud. This fraud is caused by my not honoring the contract. The government does not have a right to restrict my speech in a contract only as an arbitrator of contracts do they have a right to restrict my actions (ie: that I live up to the conditions of the contract). - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBM5rSwY9Co1n+aLhhAQHilwP9Fk67C2DaN3c8n4xTFvs/D0YeRAs6N85e YooM+RAWATwuD2r7AsgB3mpxyRd954c3JIs2XLY+3nHVxiOpzBCj5LIFc8k0payS 0kBokWC+4QZDcJeZkDzD1D9XUcFI028dM5oaqeLlymtRECWwfq/OwTrpXbriW+rb W3kqClU8HNA= =nb0O -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
"William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com> writes:
<sigh> Ofcource what I say in a contract is "free". I can say anything I want in a contract solong as the parties involved agree.
Are ads a part of the contract, though?
What is controled is my actions not my speech. If I enter into a "contract" to provide borshch on the promise that it will cure your cancer *knowing* that it will not then I am guilty of fraud. This fraud is caused by my not honoring the contract. The government does not have a right to restrict my speech in a contract only as an arbitrator of contracts do they have a right to restrict my actions (ie: that I live up to the conditions of the contract).
If I enter into a sales contract with Kent to give him borsch to cure his cancer, and this is not an FDA-approved treatment, then this contract is against public policy and shouldn't be enforceable. :-) But to convict me of fraud, the gubmint should prove that borshch doesn't cure cancer. How would one prove that? --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
<sigh> Ofcource what I say in a contract is "free". I can say anything I want in a contract solong as the parties involved agree.
Are ads a part of the contract, though?
I wouldn`t say so, in the UK the DTI and the Director of fair trading regulates the market in such a way that one cannot make claims that are known to be false in advertisements. To use your example, if you post an ad saying Borscht <sp?> cures cancer, and someone buys beet from you as a cure, you will normally have a contract of sale which says "...beet will cure all cancer and the customer will regain normal health in this respect" etc. etc. If the customer then dies of cancer, you have breached that contract. However, the advertisment itself does not take the form of a contract, or part thereof, if you had not sold the beet, but only said that it cures cancer, your advertisement would have been pure protected speech. Besides which, anyone buying Borscht to cure cancer is probably better removed from the gene pool anyway ;-).
If I enter into a sales contract with Kent to give him borsch to cure his cancer, and this is not an FDA-approved treatment, then this contract is against public policy and shouldn't be enforceable. :-)
Exactly, but of course your only real crime would be the breach of contract, not the FDA-Non approval, this breach would of course be a civil crime the penalties for which would be part of the contract or defined in an external "default penalties" contract which would be implicitly #included into the original contract.
But to convict me of fraud, the gubmint should prove that borshch doesn't cure cancer. How would one prove that?
This is why I think such a contract would not occur, even if it were a more sensible example (eg. a few years ago before the mainstream tests, saying that AZT prolonged the life of HIV carriers), more likely the contract would say that the AZT/Borscht etc. "increased the probability of cure/increased the probability of living longer" etc. This would be virtually impossible to disprove, unless the improvement probability were to be specified. To disprove that Borscht cures cancer would be a simple matter which I leave as an exercise to the reader ;-). Datacomms Technologies data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"
On Sun, Jun 08, 1997 at 10:31:41AM -0500, William H. Geiger III wrote:
Drug regulation muddies the waters quite a bit -- the issue is commercial speech in general. And that issue is a more basic one -- some entity (the government, in this case) is designated as the "enforcer of contracts". Contracts are special documents that by their very nature involve "enforcement". What you say in a contract binds you. What you say outside of a contract does not. What you say in a contract is, therefore, and by definition, not "free".
<sigh> Ofcource what I say in a contract is "free". I can say anything I want in a contract solong as the parties involved agree.
What is controled is my actions not my speech. If I enter into a "contract" to provide borshch on the promise that it will cure your cancer *knowing* that it will not then I am guilty of fraud. This fraud is caused by my not honoring the contract. The government does not have a right to restrict my speech in a contract only as an arbitrator of contracts do they have a right to restrict my actions (ie: that I live up to the conditions of the contract).
By this reasoning the mutual fund companies don't have restricted speech either -- they are perfectly free to put whatever they want in their prospecti -- the government will just come along and restrict their actions, later. Therefore, their freedom of speech is in no way being impinged. The fact is, a contract, by definition, implies that there are remedies, and an authority to enforce those remedies. Furthermore, the rules that the authority uses need to be clear and explicit, and people entering into contracts under that authority better follow those rules. In particular, they would be well advised to use speech in the contract that the authority understands. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html
On Sun, Jun 08, 1997 at 11:46:54AM -0500, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> writes: [.interesting historical references deleted.]
their very nature involve "enforcement". What you say in a contract binds you. What you say outside of a contract does not. What you say in a contract is, therefore, and by definition, not "free".
When a tobacco company says in an ad, "Joe Camel is cool", what kind of contractual obligations does it assume?
None. I did not say that all ads were part of a contract.
Have you ever bought a used car, Kent? Have you seen the language in the contract that throws out whatever promises the saleguy made that are not a part of the contract?
Yes, but never from a used-car lot, always from people I know. I have bought a new car -- I don't recall the details of the contract, but it seems quite probable that such a clause would exist.
If I claim on Usenet that borshch cures cancer, who are the counterparties, and what consideration do I get?
No one. None. I didn't say that all ads were contracts. It seems to me, though, that there is no clear dividing line possible between advertising and verbal contracts, and that the clause you mention in the used car case is indirect evidence in support of this -- car companies consider it prudent, after all, to get you to sign something that relinquishes your right to hold a salesman to what he says. I believe the ambiguity between ad and verbal contract is unavoidable in principle. Can you suggest any simple clear rule that works? "Caveat emptor" won't do it -- one of the primary purposes of contracts is to give redress in the case of non-performance, which is directly contrary to caveat emptor. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html
On Sat, Jun 07, 1997 at 01:53:05PM -0500, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Declan McCullagh <declan@pathfinder.com> writes: [...]
Yes, the only honorable response to speech you don't like is to ignore it or to respond with more speech.
Quite so. The issue, then, is "what is speech". I put a 190 db megaphone next to your head and scream into it, and your eardrums rupture and the blood flows, that's arguably not speech. I would argue that in order for something to fall under the absolute protections free speech it has to meet certain characteristics -- it can't lead to direct bodily harm, or property damage, or any other kind of "damage" that is legally defined. So the question of free speech is really, when you think about it, a question about what legally constitutes "damage". In the internet context, then, activities that cause any reasonable definition of "damage" could be controlled, under the "non-aggression principle" if nothing else. I think a reasonable definition of damage in an internet context is "excess interference with other transmission" (for some values of excess). -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html
Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> writes:
On Sat, Jun 07, 1997 at 01:53:05PM -0500, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Declan McCullagh <declan@pathfinder.com> writes: [...]
Yes, the only honorable response to speech you don't like is to ignore it or to respond with more speech.
Quite so. The issue, then, is "what is speech". I put a 190 db megaphone next to your head and scream into it, and your eardrums rupture and the blood flows, that's arguably not speech.
Recall also how a few months ago Declan compared me to a loud drunk in a bar who was drowning out all other patrons with noise, so they couldn't talk there and had to toss me out. Fortunately, neither of your analogies can happen on the Internet.
I would argue that in order for something to fall under the absolute protections free speech it has to meet certain characteristics -- it can't lead to direct bodily harm, or property damage, or any other kind of "damage" that is legally defined.
So the question of free speech is really, when you think about it, a question about what legally constitutes "damage".
In the internet context, then, activities that cause any reasonable definition of "damage" could be controlled, under the "non-aggression principle" if nothing else.
I think a reasonable definition of damage in an internet context is "excess interference with other transmission" (for some values of excess).
Suppose I post an article on alt.fan.rush-limbaugh making fun of the "feminazis" [this is a hypo - I can't stand Rush] and one of those feminazis sends me hate e-mail in response, opining that people like me deserve to have their balls cut off with rusty scissors. Suppose her e-mail inflicts such a severe psychological trauma on me that I can't get my dick up. Can I, my wife, and my 2 girlfriends sue the feminazi for damages? How many girlfriends do I need to have to make this a class action suit? Suppose I have a virus on my computer which counts the number of e-mails I receive and when it reaches 100, formats the hard disk. Suppose the feminazi's e-mail happens to be #100, and triggers the bomb. Is the poor feminazi responsible for the "damages"? Suppose her little e-mail just happens to be the one that gets my little 2GB hard disk full, causing the next incoming e-mail to be lost. Is she responsible for that too? In the Internet context, as you put it, if one can be "damaged" by the speech, it's the listener's problem, not the speaker's. One can set up one's mailbox to receive e-mail from only a given list of senders. One can even have no incoming mailbox (like the noted Usenet personality Archimedes Plutonium). --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote: [snip]
Do you believe, as I do, that "spam" deserves the protection as any other kind of speech, and that so libel, child pornography, and bolb-making ^^^^^^^^^^^ instructions? ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
How does one make bolbs anyway? Are they similar to bolb-bearings? Do you have to plant them in the spring? Why would people want to prevent you from making them? Are they any relation to J.R. "BolB" Dobbs? Dyslexics minds want to know! --- | "That'll make it hot for them!" - Guy Grand | |"The moral PGP Diffie taught Zimmermann unites all| Disclaimer: | | mankind free in one-key-steganography-privacy!" | Ignore the man | |`finger -l alano@teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key | behind the keyboard.| | http://www.ctrl-alt-del.com/~alan/ |alan@ctrl-alt-del.com|
participants (8)
-
Alan Olsen -
Declan McCullagh -
Declan McCullagh -
dlv＠bwalk.dm.com -
ichudov＠Algebra.COM -
Kent Crispin -
Paul Bradley -
William H. Geiger III