From: hal@rain.org
Date: Mon Feb 01 1999 - 10:25:50 MST
James D. Wilson, <netsurf@sersol.com>, writes, regarding spam:
> What to do?
> [...]
> 2. Lobby your state senators/representatives for strong anti-spam
> legislation in your state which includes prison time for
> knowingly/intentionally transferring the cost of advertisement from
> the sender to intermediate networks and the end users. Class C felony
> would do the trick.
Is this really a solution in keeping with Extropian philosophy? Do you
want to throw people into prison because they sent you some information
which you didn't want to receive?
I see serious problems in making unsolicited commercial email illegal.
It sets a number of dangerous precedents. Email is a protocol which
we voluntarily engage in. Spammers are using the protocol in a manner
in which we allowed but did not intend. Throwing people in jail for
this is going to mean that using any information protocol in the future
will be fraught with danger. There will be gray areas in terms of what
is intended and what is not intended, and it ends up making the laws
capricious and enforced at the whim of judges and prosecutors.
There is also the problem of providing different rules for commercial
and personal email. Presumably we don't want to throw someone in jail
because he sends a personal, unsolicited email, to someone else. It is
only "commercial" unsolicited email that we want to criminalize. But we
can't draw a clean line between the personal and commercial aspects of
our activities. Especially in the future, I believe we will be able
to have more autonomy and independence in how we structure our lives,
so that what we do personally and commercially may not be so different.
Every posting I make is an advertisement for me. I have gotten jobs
in the past based solely on people having read my postings on various
topics and deciding that I am knowledgeable and write well. As we
become more of an information economy this will become much more common.
If spam is criminalized, I might be thrown in jail just for responding
to a question which was widely posted.
The EU has privacy laws which require companies not to remember
certain things about their customers. I'm not sure how they apply to
individual businessmen. Do these laws claim to regulate the contents of
people's minds? Is it only in the commercial sphere that people must
be forgetful? What will happen when people are able to extend their
own memories with technological aids? The philosophy of this approach
is completely misguided.
I would prefer to see methods which address the problem directly within
the framework of the protocol, based on technology, rather than threats
of prison. Filtering and blocking systems are becoming available, and
if unsolicited commercial email continues to grow as a problem, they
should improve in sophistication and capability.
Frankly, I don't think UCE is that bad a problem right now. I get 200-300
pieces of email a day, and only about 5-10% is spam. I delete spam
instantly; there is no need to peruse it carefully. Just the format of
the message on the screen is usually enough to give it away, and if not,
the first line of the message does so. It is a very small effort compared
to reading and handling the bulk of my email. (I do have spam filters,
but the benefit from running them is so slight that I don't even bother
any more.)
The fact that filtering software is not a top seller is a strong
indication that most people don't care about spam. You have a small
group of very vocal complainers who seem to object on philosophical as
much as practical grounds. They are offended that advertisers are able
to send mail without paying for it, just like everyone else.
Rather than try to change the world by creating a new class of criminal
behavior and throwing yet more people in jail, we should work on
cooperative approaches by which people can solve the problem on their
own.
Hal
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