Subject: Re: [Asrg] Protecting Legitimate Commercial Email (was Re: ESPC P roposal)

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 23:53:54 -0400

At 10:34 PM -0400 4/30/03, mathew wrote:
>>No, that isn't how they do it.  Court suits are a last resort.
>
>What are the other resorts?

Negotiation.

>>when their customers spam.  They don't.  They don't even do the 
>>"We'll charge your credit card $500 if you spam" thing.
>
>I'm pretty sure Barry Shein does. Perhaps he could chime in on 
>whether that's just an empty threat, though.

I think it was Barry who told me it wasn't worth it--but I'm *quite* 
sure he can speak for himself on the issue :-).

>>  Why? Because the customer simply disputes the charge, and then 
>>you're off to court to try and get $500.  You can't win that game.
>
>So what you're saying is that providing I defraud you of less than 
>$500, you wouldn't bother to do anything about it?

Not if the cost of recovering it is greater than $500.  This isn't 
abstract, it's happened to me personally.  I had a plumber walk off 
with $6000 of my money, skip out on the court dates, and skip out on 
the bankruptcy hearing.  We put a trace on him for a while, but 
eventually we gave up.  Getting the money back costs too much.

Modern society doesn't work because people will sue you at the drop 
of the hat if you do something wrong.  It works because people are 
basically honest.

>Made-up e-mail addresses, lying on subscription forms and 
>deliberately subscribing other people's e-mail addresses are not a 
>problem if you're doing confirmed opt-in. And if you're not doing 
>confirmed opt-in, you're a spammer.

I used to think confirmed opt-in was the answer.  I'm no longer so 
sure.  End users are not as smart as I thought they were.  (And I 
didn't think they were very smart from the get go.)  But there's 
certainly no point in labeling 90% of the emailing community spammers 
just because they don't agree with you on how to verify an address. 
You aren't going to get very far in negotiations that way.

>>What we need in this system is some way of restoring trust.  Trust 
>>by a recipient that they can safely unsubscribe.  Trust by a 
>>bulkmailer that the list owner has followed best practices.  Trust 
>>by the list owner that the recipients haven't lied.  There's a 
>>circle there, and it's broken.
>
>Well, those things would be nice, but I don't see that any of them 
>would solve the spam problem, or even improve the situation.

That's because you've already decided that everyone who doesn't 
believe what you believe is evil.  You've got no where to go when it 
comes to trust.  On the bright side, you are being consistent. 
That's perfectly in line with assuming  that people behave because 
they are afraid that otherwise they'll get sued.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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---

From: Barry Shein <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 16:25:10 -0400

On May 1, 2003 at 00:29 [email-masked] (Markus Stumpf) wrote:
 > I don't see why we, as an ISP, or our customer should pay for the emails
 > to be delivered to other ISPs, ASPs, ...

Because that's a generally acceptable way to deal with scaling issues
such as sending out millions of newsletters. The other choice is that
the recipient is paying, why is that more fair (particularly in the
case of bulk commercial email)?

-- 
        -Barry Shein

Software Tool & Die    | [email-masked]           | http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202        | Login: 617-739-WRLD
The World              | Public Access Internet     | Since 1989     *oo*
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---

From: Barry Shein <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 17:01:12 -0400

On April 30, 2003 at 22:34 [email-masked] (mathew) wrote:
 > I'm pretty sure Barry Shein does. Perhaps he could chime in on whether 
 > that's just an empty threat, though.

I have in the past charged customers for spam cleanup tho we haven't
had a real* spamming incident arising from here in years

 > >  Why? Because the customer simply disputes the charge, and then you're 
 > > off to court to try and get $500.  You can't win that game.

A merchant can dispute a dispute if they are willing to provide
evidence that the dispute is fraudulent and otherwise follow-up.

It's harder if the merchant doesn't have a signed slip, and they're
still not likely to get the money from the card co. But if the card
company sees it the merchant's way the card is likely to be cancelled
immediately, presumably with an entry in the mystical all-knowing
credit db, and of course the merchant is still free to pursue the
money by other means tho I agree that's rarely worthwhile for small
amts.

* by non-real I am referring to stuff like joe jobs or people
complaining that they'd been "spammed" by a mailing list they'd
clearly signed up for, stuff like that happens.)

-- 
        -Barry Shein

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 15:38:31 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Barry Shein <[email-masked]>

> case of bulk commercial email)?

What's "fair" got to do with it?  You said repeatedly earlier that
all that matters is what market wants and is willing to pay for.

As I understand it, your reasoning implies that AOL would never have
joined the Internet years ago but would have stayed separate.  After
all, AOL had all of those users that everyone on the Internet would
be eager to pay to reach.  I've the impression that for years AOL
thought that was valid reasoning.  Are you saying that spam is such
a serious problem that major ISPs will be able to stuff the Internet
back into the big-BBS model?  If so, I disagree.  I think that the
idea of point-to-point applications including for email has irrevocably
replaced the world that gave us European style PTTs, U.S. style Ma
Bell, and the big BBSs of AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy.

I do agree that money will eventually be invoked to control (but not
fix) the spam problem.  My long standing prediction is that eventually
governments will tax commercial bulk email, but not political or
"non-profit" bulk mail (whether spam or not).  The tax will be sold
to consumers as "providing universal service," "closing the digital
divide," "protecting our children from porn spam," and "infrastructure
upgrades to fight terrorism" (i.e. pay for the FBI's wet dreams of
point-and-click remote wire taps).   Failure to pay the $0.01 to
$0.05/addressee tax will be a felony.  Half of the money will go to
the bureacracy that counts the money and chases tax evaders.  The
other half will be given to ISPs that agree to play the game.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]
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From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 16:20:10 -0600 (MDT)

> ...

My code book says that translates into the observation that contrary
to some claims, ISPs that really care about stopping spam do not
have spam problems.  An alternate idiom is that the Internet is
segregating itself into spam-friendly and spam-hostile neighborhoods
with various sorts of filtering robots manning the barricades.

---

From: Barry Shein <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 18:59:23 -0400

> all that matters is what market wants and is willing to pay for.

It's a colloqualism? It's a reflexive response to "why?"

At any rate, the point is that mail will be paid for. If we simplify
that to either the Sender pays or the Recipient pays then arguing that
it's not right (fair?) to make the sender pays leaves us with the
recpient paying.

Now we can discuss which of those two is the right thing.

What I said earlier was the market would set the specific price of any
new regimen, in answer to someone asking me what the pricing would be
(for sender-pays mail.)

To some extent a new pricing discipline does have to show some
superficial amount of "fairness" if one expects the legal system to
enforce contracts. For starters it has to be agreed that it's legal,
but there's more involved (e.g. anti-trust considerations.)

But that begs the question, somewhat.

However, what a new pricing discipline does not necessarily have to do
is withstand nit-picking scrutiny from people who were previously
getting the same service for (more or less) free.

I wouldn't ask a spammer, e.g., whether it seemed reasonable to charge
for sending spam. etc.

 > Bell, and the big BBSs of AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy.

You use a lot of loaded terms here, specifically to portray these
ideas as inherently retrograde.

I don't think that imposing a pricing model on bulk e-mailers is
tautological with morphing into 1980's style BBS's.

I do think that in the email world "point to point" is dying a rapid
and painful death. For example, consider large ISPs who now block port
25 entirely.

Ah well, it was a nice idea. Being able to create an account from the
login prompt on ITS at MIT was a nice idea, but...hmm, actually you
can create an acct from our login prompt...

 > other half will be given to ISPs that agree to play the game.

I think it's going to be difficult to tax something which isn't priced
though I'd agree that if the ISPs began charging for bulk email (e.g.)
the govt would probably soon tax it, they can't resist a clanging cash
register, or conversely if the govt ever required the ISPs to account
for bulk email (to assess taxation) the ISPs would quickly come up
with the idea of adding their own charge to that same data.

But it's not the worst fate if it brings sanity to this mess.

I'll make my own prediction:

If something doesn't happen to reflect mail volume back into the
income for ISPs email will in a few years be owned by the RBOCs as
everyone else exits or bankrupts out of the business, and the RBOCs
will just merge it into SMS and charge you 15 cents per message for
every single msg.

Choose your nightmare.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

---

From: Markus Stumpf <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 11:58:10 +0200

> case of bulk commercial email)?

Is a newsletter informing people that want to buy a house about real estate
commercial email? Why should the estate agent pay each and every
provider for being allowed to have the email delivered to the customers
of the ISP? The /customers/ of the ISP signed up to receive the
newsletter to be informed.

Oh ... and as the estate agent ... how much transferals to how many ISPs
do I have to make per newsletter to get it delivered?

    \Maex

-- 
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Research & Development |       D-80807 Muenchen    | Fax: +49 (89) 32356-299
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