Subject: [Asrg] 0. General - News Article - Anti-spam laws

From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2003 14:28:13 -0400

The following CNET News.com article discusses various pros and cons of 
anti-spam laws:

http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-5059822.html

Some quotes:

-------snip-----
The folly of antispam legislation
By William Blundon
August 5, 2003, 4:00 AM PT

"Many of these legislative goals are laudable. However, they fail to make 
several key distinctions. Most people have an implicit hierarchy of what 
they consider spam. Illegal, fraudulent and misleading e-mail is spam. 
E-mail from an unknown source is "spam lite." Unsolicited commercial e-mail 
from a respected company may be spam, junk mail or simply unwanted but 
acceptable free speech. E-mail from a company with whom the consumer has an 
existing commercial relationship can also be considered spam if it is 
simply unwanted or repetitive. These distinctions are highly idiosyncratic 
and are not amenable to broad legislation. "

"The economics of the Internet are different from those of telephone 
networks or the postal system and do not bode well for any legislative 
campaign. Moving a telemarketing operation offshore is an expensive 
proposition, while direct mail costs increase dramatically when mail 
crosses geographic borders. But it usually costs less to operate a 
sophisticated e-mail marketing program from New Delhi than it does from New 
York."

"Some spammers now send more than 100 million e-mails per day using servers 
known as "spam cannons." Does it really matter where their servers are 
located? Most pending spam legislation is designed for consumer, not 
employee, e-mail. Does it matter to a spammer if he sends e-mail to my home 
or office? Will companies force their employees to register their corporate 
e-mail addresses on a do-not-spam list? Will the company do it for them? 
What if hackers crack the security on a national database of those 
spam-blocked addresses?  Ethical companies will comply with any new spam 
legislation. Black or gray spam operations will invest whatever it takes to 
stay ahead of the technology curve and beyond the arm of the law. As a 
result, the percentage of dishonest e-mail will only increase.

Copyright ¬1995-2003 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.
-------snip----- 

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From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2003 19:16:01 -0400

At 03:36 PM 8/5/2003, Dave Crocker wrote:
>Peter,
>
>PK> I still strongly believe that a consent-based architecture that lets
>PK> the owner of an email address decide the policies surrounding that
>PK> email address is the only realistic solution.
>
>A cliche about the Internet is that it has only one technical challenge:
>scaling.
>
>If there is a problem with infrastructure operation, a solution that
>seeks to permit infinite variations, according to the preferences of
>each participant, is not likely to scale.
>
>See the last 10 year's of effort to add QOS to the Internet, for
>examples.

However, a consent model would be acting on edges, much like the filtering 
that is done today. QOS on the other hand is placed at the network center 
which is much harder. Are you implying that an edge-based consent solution 
would not scale properly? Can you provide some examples and more information?

Yakov