Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?

[Bill Stewart]

At 04:45 PM 08/02/2003 -0700, mindfuq at comcast.net wrote:
>We definately need a law making it illegal for an ISP to block
>non-spam email.  I cannot email a friend who uses AOL, and wants to
>receive my email, because AOL blocks it.  

Fearghas pointed out the obvious workaround for this,
which is that if you don't like AOL's policies on 
incoming or outgoing email, or your cable modem provider's policies*
(which in the US are pretty much guaranteed to be lame),
or the cheapest DSL provider around,
but you want to keep them because they're cheap or have
other features you like, then fine, 
just use them for Internet packet forwarding,
and find yourself an email provider with policies you like.
You don't need to find all of them - you only need one.

There are about 10,000 ISPs in the US, last time I looked,
plus hundreds to thousands of hosting and colo providers who will
sell you at least a virtual host, plus myriads of customers of
hosting providers who have the resources to run an email business,
plus hundreds of thousands of unemployed former dot-commers
who'd probably be interested in starting a business if they can't
find themselves an employer, and at least 50% of them have the 
capital required to start a small email provider business,
and at least 10% of them have enough capital to start a medium business,
big enough to get going if they can find customers.

That means that if just 0.01% of those people or businesses
agree with you about how the email business really should be run,
then there are probably a dozen or so that claim to be just what you want,
and at least half a dozen that are actually competent.

If just 1% of them agree with you, then there are thousands of them.
Go use Google and go find them, 
or post a message in the appropriate newsgroups asking for them.
If you *can't* fund a dozen providers like that, much less a thousand,
then obviously the collective wisdom Internet community doesn't 
agree with your ideas well enough to justify making a law against
how the other 99% or 99.99% of email providers run their businesses.

Furthermore, if you think you're RIGHT, not just about how you want
_some_ ISP to run a service so you can get what you want for your email,
but COSMICALLY, STALLMANESQUELY RIGHT about how every ISP should be run,
then don't try to convince some technically clueless Congresscritter,
get off your ass and go convince people.  By the time you've convinced
20% of the customers that that's what ISPs should do,
and convinced 20% of the ISPs, everybody else will get the clue.

And if you want to get rich while doing so,
as opposed to merely popular like Stallman (:-),
one of the best ways to do it is to set up a business and
show the other ISPs what a REAL mail server looks like
while millions of customers show up at your doorstep
(hmmm, that's back to the "get off your ass" bit again),
or more realistically, dozens show up which gets you enough user feedback
to tweak the service and advertising to attract hundreds of users,
which brings in enough cash flow to advertise to get thousands,
at which point you've had trouble scaling and have redesigned
to something actually scalable, which is a bit tough at $5/month * 1000 users,
and then the world beats a path to your door because somebody's
finally heard of you.