[Sosfbay-discuss] The End of the Internet?

[Cameron L. Spitzer]

>Date: Sat, 04 Feb 2006 11:40:09 -0800
>From: Wes Rolley <wrolley at charter.net>
>To: sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org
>Subject: Re: [Sosfbay-discuss] The End of the Internet?

>Just to exerpt the conclusions from what Cameron said, he speaks the 
>truth.  I might add that one of the costs that I pay as an internet user 
>is to have my  cable company handle all of the email that I receive.  
>Most of it is SPAM.  Some of the rest is malicious.  The SPAMMERS exist 
>because email is free.

Not really.  Spammers are like cockroaches.  They have evolved
to fill an ecological niche, the Internet service provider
who does not enforce his terms of service and peering contracts.
Internet service providers who do those things don't emit much
spam.  It is not the cockroaches' fault when they infest
a dirty kitchen.  It is the fault of the owner of the kitchen.
It could be the proprietor has chosen a flawed business model,
where he can't afford to keep his kitchen clean.  The cockroaches
are still his fault.

Email isn't free.  Never was.  Email became possible because
of a covenant, a mutual understanding, that each message is
something the recipient wants and expects.  Therefore the
recipients agree in advance to pay for email from strangers.
Spamming, therefore, is theft.  Stealing is already illegal.
It's also trespass to chattel and illegal conversion of assets.

During the twenty year period that the public email system
evolved into its current form, that covenant was good enough.
There weren't any "rogue" Internet service providers.
Anybody who spammed or tried to crack other people's machines
got thrown off line immediately.  That period lasted until
1994, when a jackass named Phil Lawlor in charge of an Internet
carrier named AGIS decided to let a sociopath named Sanford Wallace
set up a spamming company on his network.  AGIS' peers
blinked, and the long peace was over.
(Wallace had been in the junk fax business before, and there
is evidence he's gone back to it.)
AGIS went bankrupt, but the other backbone carriers followed
its corrupt and negligent model anyway.

By then, it was no longer possible to invent and roll out
a new email system.  The cooperative environment of
the Internet Engineering Task Force had been overwhelmed by
battles for market share between Microsoft and its
"competitors."


> If everyone had to pay a micro-charge for their 
>email, it would not be much of an additional cost.

This problem has been thoroughly examined by minds greater than
ours.  The consensus conclusion is that would be some other
message transmission system.  With postage, it wouldn't be the
public email system any more.

There are two big problems.
1.  Nobody has made a defacto-standard of a vendor-neutral,
host-neutral, open Internet application in a decade.
(The last one was Adobe's PDF.)  It just doesn't happen
any more.  If we scrap the public SMTP email system,
we'll replace it with some kind of trade secret proprietary thing,
with backdoors for Homeland Security and Microsoft.
Or we'll get competing incompatible "standards" as happened in
streaming audio, instant messaging, and cell phones.
The collegial, cooperative atmosphere that incubated
SMTP email and the domain name system (together, they're
the public email system) no longer exists.
And you can forget open-source, trustworthy email software.
Microsoft will change their postage system constantly
so nobody else can write compatible micro-postage "email"
software.  Nobody but Microsoft is in any position to force
a micro-postage system on the public.

2.  There would still be spam.  Before the current bot-net
situation developed, spammers used to send from "throwaway"
dial-up accounts obtained with fake identities and stolen
credit cards.  They'd just go back to that, but charge
their micro-postage on the stolen accounts.
Or they'd break into legitimate servers and send their
crap on somebody else's tab.  But much worse,
so-called "legitimate" spammers would be happy to pay to
bombard you with their "legitimate" advertising.
Get ready for giant spams from Safeway and Publisher's
Clearinghouse.
The Dems and GOP could afford micro-postage for political
spam, but the Greens couldn't.
I believe one reason the telcos allow spammers on their
networks in violation of their contracts is they are
"softening up" the public to accept "legitimate" spam.
That's why the Direct Marketing Association (and their
sock-puppets at the American Civil Liberty Union)
are so pro-spam, too.

Micro-postage "email" sounds good at first but it turns out
to be a really, really bad idea.

Spam is not a technology problem, it is a social problem.
It cannot be solved by technology. 
(This is why techno-bandaids like micro-postage and Sender Policy
Framework and Domain Keys have failed.)

Today's public email technology is quite adequate.
It just needs existing laws (including civil contract law)
enforced.  And a consumer boycott of the culpable corporations
wouldn't hurt.



Cameron