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

[Declan McCullagh]

Well, let's take this up one level of abstraction. We can stop spam
from flooding our inboxes (an economic bad) by:
1. law
2. AUPs with backbone providers/hosting services (industry self-regulation)
3. cypherpunkly end-user technology

I oppose the first. I think the second is what the market is moving
toward, in much the same way businesses won't let customers conduct
DoS attacks from their networks.

If spammers want to start their own backbone provider, they are free
to do so. Nobody may route their packets, but that is a choice made by
free people living in a free society. In order to make it economically
attractive for AT&T to route their traffic, SpamBackbone may have to
write a check. Or perhaps SpamBackbone (more likely) will cut a deal
with AOL and MSN and spam their customers a certain numver of times,
for a fee. This fee would presumably contribute toward keeping some
AOL and Hotmail accounts "free" to users, or available at a lower cost
than would be otherwise, with the concomitant price of spam.

Preto! We've converted spam into advertising.

The third option is perhaps the best, because it's more granular. It's
certainly more cypherpunkly. But I think the second is consistent with
anarcho-capitalist principles as well.

-Declan


On Sun, Nov 05, 2000 at 07:11:23AM -0500, William H. Geiger III wrote:
> In <a05010401b628f787f0a1@[207.111.241.180]>, on 11/03/00 
>    at 05:20 PM, Tim May <tcmay at got.net> said:
> 
> >Oh, I doubt AT&T has "learned the error of its ways." This is just  their
> >spin control.
> 
> >Like Esther Dyson's spin control..."I won't let it happen again."
> 
> >Until, of course, the next mass mailing to her "Dear Friends" goes out.
> 
> 
> Am I the only one here that sees something terribly wrong?
> 
> AT&T is the bad guy because they hosted a website of an alleged spamer?
> AT&T may have seen the "error of their ways" because they are now
> performing content based censorship by shutting down the same website (no
> SPAM was being sent over their network)? Exactly how far down this
> slippery slope should AT&T go?
> 
> It is amazing how members of this list can go from cypherpunks to
> censorpunks so easily, I guess SPAM is the root passphrase for some
> members principles.
>