Re: [Asrg] Anti-spam laws do work, FYI. There's proof.

["David Wall" <d.wall at computer.org>]

>   Please get this through your head, a non-filtered ISP is not going to
> be available for under $100 a month.  The bandwidth and DASD farms and
> mailservers necessary to handle all that spam (and the staff to admin
> them) cost real money.  And, no, I am not cheap enough to sell my
> personal info, or view a scrolling ad-bar, or allow GMail to rummage
> through my correspondence in order to get a cheap/free big inbox.

Sounds far fetched to me since most businesses run their own smtp servers
and they're not paying their ISP $100/month per user for disk and bandwidth.

Besides, capitalism should work as it was designed: the ISPs should start to
charge for bandwidth/disk if those are issues that need to be charged for.
They tell us unlimited email or limited by the bandwidth pipes we have (such
as via DSL), but then tell us they'll block a bunch of stuff to reduce their
costs even if it means I cannot send using my "forwarder-based email" from
computer.org and perhaps certain messages I cannot receive because they are
being blocked as spam or for whatever other reason, like the other party is
sending to me using his computer.org email address because his smtp server
doesn't stop it outbound, but my ISP stops it inbound.

How about they instead increase their prices?  How about instead, they
charge customers to add blocking/filtering to their accounts for an added
charge?  These are ways to MAKE money by allowing the end user to make the
choice, like call blocking and caller id in the telephone world (it's not
free).  In the end, when you walk in your town, you can't control who you
will run into, or who will talk to you or what they will say to you.
Freedom has a price to be paid, and that includes KKK marches from time to
time.

The ISPs would serve themselves best if they remained carriers and offered
services they could sell, such as spam filtering, to those users that want
it (many would, I figure, and those that don't probably have their own
solutions in place).  They shouldn't be the judge of whether a message is
worthy or not.

And we should leave illegal activities to law enforcement.  Spamming is
already illegal, and following the money will do wonders to curbing such
activities, as would tracking down the virus/spyware/zombie-creator writers,
as would general education to users about spam and viruses (can you believe
some people have no virus filters on their Windows system and they don't get
infected any more than those with virus filters because they don't open
unsolicited attachments or visit phished web sites).

Recall that the post office doesn't stop letter bombs, but when they come
through, law enforcement is there to track it down.

Recall that the phone company doesn't block threatening phone calls, but law
enforcement will follow up.

Recall that the police don't prevent people from talking to others on the
street, but if someone is being abusive, threatening, etc., the police
follow up.


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