[eff-austin] Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?

[ken]

mindfuq at comcast.net wrote:


> Nice!  I've been thinking I should move there for a while.  I also
> heard that by 2006 London and all the major cities will have seemless
> wifi coverage.  The reason Europe is on the ball with this is the EU
> just passed five laws to deregulate emerging telecom companies so they
> can compete with the monopolists.  

A bit of wishful thinking here I think.

[...]

>>But it don't solve the spam problem :-(
> 
> 
> That's okay- the antispammers are a bigger problem, and this needs to
> be attacked first.  Europe is already a step ahead of the U.S. on
> that. 

This is really not true at all. In fact it is far more likely (or 
maybe less unlikely)  that European countries would pass draconian 
anti-spam laws than it is in the US because they don't on the 
whole have the same attitude to free speech.

 > I've got spamassassin to control spam.

And so, maybe, do AOL.

The real problem with your whole argument of the last week or so 
is that your mail is not passing across Mallory's back yard, or 
through pipes beneath his house - you are  expecting him to carry 
it across and deliver it for you. And if he doesn't want to then 
he doesn't want to.

Solution?

Choose one of:

- get your friends to use a different ISP

- build your own network

- get your government to take over AOL on your behalf and run it 
as a public utility

- Get With The Program (TM) and fix your mail so it conforms with 
whatever arbitrary rules AOL have set up. After all SOME people 
manage to mail AOL customers. In their eyes you must be doing 
something wrong.  How dare you stand against the Corporate Might 
(TM) of what Made America Great(TM)!

- use letter post


Each of the above has a downside.