CDR: RE: FW: BLOCK: AT&T signs bulk hosting contract with spammers

Gil Hamilton gil_hamilton at hotmail.com
Fri Nov 3 09:55:51 PST 2000


James Wilson writes:

>Does shifting the cost of millions of dollars every month on to other
>businesses, individuals and governments qualify as "significant (heck,
>even measurable) harm"?  Yes.
>
>Spam is VERY EXPENSIVE -- this document explains why...
>http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?INW19980504S0003
>
>Spam has also been defined, *in multiple court cases*, as "trespassing
>upon a chattel", as denial of service attacks (from the flood of
>bounces from the fake return addresses crippling third party servers,
>)fraud and damaging business reputations (when spammers use fake
>addresses to blame innocent 3rd party businesses), and as theft of
>service.  Do you consider trespassing, denial of service attacks,
>fraud, damaging reputations, and stealing services ethical behavior?

I have no doubt that spam *does* cost millions of dollars every
month to handle.  However, describing it as "trespassing", "stealing"
and so forth is simply an attempt to demonize it with emotionally
loaded terms.  It's amazing to me that anyone can get away with
accusing someone else of "stealing" a resource the accuser is giving
away for free.

Consider ordinary snail-type junk mail: many think it's annoying,
wish they didn't have to deal with it, and often try to block its
transmission. Nobody calls it stealing or trespassing, however,
because the junk mailer has to pay to send it (in the same way that
anyone else has to pay to send a piece of mail).

Hence, the obvious solution is to make it *cost money to send mail*
(or to use any other network resource).  Combine that with automated
reputation handling -- charge a small fee to accept mail from
"unknown" parties -- and this both reduces spam and shifts the cost of
resource usage to those using the resources.  Of course, this won't
completely eliminate spam -- nor arguably *should* it -- but it has
the potential to make it less cost-effective that it is now -- where
the cost is effectively zero once you've amassed your list of
addresses.  This would at least make spammers aim at a more
tightly-focused target market.

- GH

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