Experts See End to Computer 'Spam' by 2006 2

[jsteph]

<<Target those companies... >>

To 'target' implies action, and who's going to do this? Spam is a hassle enough so no one's going to do extra to, say write complaint letters, or whatever other mean of targeting there are. It's legal to sell most of these things, so the authorities can't target them.

The only way to target them is by ignoring them, but that's what most people do anyway--the ones who don't are the ones who acutally respond and buy.

I agree that the logistics of implementing a fee are not easy, but not insurmountable. The major ISP's do not like spam--it doesn't help them to collect $19.95 per month from someone who gobbles 90% of their bandwidth, so they agree on that. If the spammer has his own ISP it would easily be blacklisted by other major ISP's, which effectively reduces his broadcast ability by tens of millions of customers--essentially blocking him from the market.

The formation of a consortium is possible, which agrees to, say, per-email fees and other spam-fighting measures. Non-members could be subject to jump whatever hurdles the consortium would place on non-members before accepting email traffic from them (such as blacklisting, etc), which would encourage membership.

I don't know all the technical details about ISP's and email, etc., but I do know that it's folly to just throw your hands up and give up. Something can be done at the ISP level regarding fees, and working out the details is a job for those directly involved in the industry.
--jsteph

 

[ChrisHunt]

Who's going to set the level of this fee? If it's the ISPs they're likely to compete with eachother by setting it lower and lower. If it's the government, the same competition will take place on an international level - with people moving to offshore ISPs with cheaper/free email sending untrammelled by this misguided regulation.

Spammers will EASILY work around this - by setting up offshore, by spoofing their way around blacklists, by all sorts of unscrupulous dirty tricks as yet unthought of. At the same time it will cause a LOT of pain to legitimate businesses, web-site owners and users. Do you ever mark threads on TT for email notification? It's a useful function - but would be ruinously expensive to offer under your system - the site owner would have paid 20p so far for this thread alone.

If a measure is ineffective, impractical and likely to cause masses of collateral damage, I think it sensible not to do it. Call that defeatist if you like.

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[jsteph]

I'm not sure it matters who set's the fee, because the idea behind the fee is that it is so low (it could probably be as low as 1/4 cent or less per email) that it wouldn't be an issue as far as the price for the monthly service goes for anyone but a massive bulk-emailer.

The whole point is that the ISP's want this, and the key is to get them all (via some consortium) to agree to a charge that would be small enough to not have any bearing on their competition with each other.

But the fee is large enough, as my earlier posts said, that the bulk-emailers would be hit hard by it--so much to make spamming not profitable. Again, I'm not technically savvy enough about the nuts & bolts of smtp to know how easy it may be to spoof a blacklist, but if it is that easy to spoof blacklisting, then yes, they'll find a way around it.
--jsteph