ORBS

[Declan McCullagh]

Right. It's a cost-benefit analysis.

Bob may pick up some of Alice's bad blocks, and there's a cost to that.
But if the benefit of spam reduction outweighs the possibly-minimal
cost, well, Bob's got a good thing going and he's quite happy to continue
with that practice.

-Declan


On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 04:01:58PM -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
> You know what?  If Alice  puts up a list of all the sites 
> she's blocking mail from, there is no problem with that.  
> She is not coercing anyone. She can block any site for any 
> reason she wants -- maybe she has intestinal gas, or maybe 
> she just doesn't like somebody.  Tough toenails.
> 
> If Bob reads this list and copies it, there is no problem 
> with that either -- Bob's not coercing anyone.  
> 
> Bob winds up blocking the people Alice blocked, even if she 
> blocked them for no good reason.  But Bob is evidently okay 
> with that, or at least unable to find a better source of 
> information.
> 
> If Alice were in a competitive business, and people paid for 
> better or more well-founded recommendations  about blocking 
> lists, she'd probably be driven out of business. But whatever; 
> nobody else got into the business, so there's no competition.
> Alice has a money-losing monopoly that provides marginal 
> service.  
> 
> The only problem arises because Alice started using scans and 
> listings as weapons.  That's not wrong per se, as it's not 
> stealing or coercion -- it's just rude.  But scans themselves 
> are perfectly acceptable and necessary as the only reliable 
> means of providing this service. 
> 
> I think ORBS was exactly the kind of "reputation service" most 
> folks here argue in favor of, and while some of us may have 
> despised it, that's not sufficient reason to interfere with 
> someone else's ability to publish whatever the hell they want 
> to publish.
> 
> Or, I'll even go further.  It was an example of "private law",
> where the "law merchant" publishes a list of people who break 
> the laws they sell and then lets the market punish or not as 
> they choose.  However flawed the list, and however obnoxious 
> the merchant was about the testing to create it, isn't that 
> exactly what many of you have been arguing for the right to do?
> 
> 			Bear