Re: [PLUG] cultural ethics of email and spam

[zuzu <sean.zuzu@gmail.com>]

On 10/17/07, John Von Essen <john@essenz.com> wrote:
>
> Maybe Verizon should give you 100Mbps for $5 per month? Is that better? Oh,
> and you can run MTA's and malicious spambots behind it?
>
> My sarcasm is to illustrate a point. US telecoms and broadband access
> providers go to GREAT measures to provide high speed access at competitive
> prices. All they ask is that you behave like a user - and "users" dont run
> mail servers. There is a reason why that 5Mbps of traffic is priced at a
> unrealistic low price. The reason is your behavior is strictly viewed as an
> end-user.

I think the truth lay somewhere inbetween. USA telecoms are some of
the worst in the modern world, because of a pastiche of
over-regulation and under-regulation (i.e. regulatory capture -- many
of the monopoly benefits with few of the monopoly costs).  personally
I'd favor a Free Market where anyone can compete to run fibre to my
home (and thus do away with monopoly powers entirely).

if I were to subscribe to "real politik", something like the municipal
bond underwritten fibre loops such as UTOPIA seem to be a viable
political compromise.  so yes, that means something like $50/month for
100Mbps _up_ and down unrestricted would be what I'm looking for now
in a "perfect competition" scenario.  (15/2 for $50, the best
available with Verizon's FiOS, is still a joke compared to most of
Europe and coastal Asia.  but lack of competition due to municipality
regulation of the "rights of way" easements, combined with the
inherited sickly monopoly-minded culture of Verizon and Comcast, means
my choices are severely limited.)

or I should do more with the people at Prometheus Radio to popularize
and develop GNUradio for cognitive wireless P2P broadband.  (Direct
Action, ala "cypherpunks write code", for the win!)


> Admins who maintain mail servers which handle millions of messages a day can
> easily comment on the unbelievable amount of spam generated from MTAs behind
> residential high-speed connections (as much as 20% of total email volume).
> To say using a DUL blacklist is just an anal admin being an ass is not a
> fair assessment.

I think it is, because of an assumption that that bandwidth is
"wasted", rather than considering the option of simply
overprovisioning (which then cascades to the previous issue of why
ISPs fight so hard *not* to invest increasing total bandwidth -- which
I suspect is significantly due to the cultural FUD of the "exabyte
flood").  think of all the maintenance and transaction costs
associated with classifying spam (or any form of traffic monitoring)
compared to simply increasing the total amount of bandwidth.

http://isen.com/blog/2007/07/research-on-costs-of-net-neutrality.html


> You know its funny. For a long time ISP's did little to no abuse monitoring,
> and as a result they sort of created alot of the Spam problems. Now that
> ISP's are curbing abuse via tactics like port 25 blocking, outbound mail
> filtering, or advertising their dynamic IP space to public DUL lists,
> instead of being applauded - they are criticized. And to be honest, the
> people doing the criticizing are in the minority.

because technology transforms society.  when the Betamax ruling
normalized tape dubbing, copying was assumed as a "right"; now people
are consuming iTunes DRM and are assuming that copying is not a
"right".  most people tacitly update their cultural norms from defacto
experience.  i.e. technological determinism.  this is why empowering
rather than curtailing people with the tools they use is so vital to a
free and prosperous society.

this also happens to be a critical part of Chris Anderson's thesis in
'The Long Tail'; people assume that the scarcity constraints of shelf
space / overhead were fixed, which created a "smash hit" oriented
entertainment culture.  (and hence why "the long tail" is considered a
novel idea.)  another example would be most people's belief in the
need for the FCC to license the radio spectrum, when cognitive radio
technology has demonstrated that monopoly use of particular
frequencies (or "colors") of light is an obsolete concept.
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