Re: Principles of Spam-abatement

[Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb at guppylake.com>]

On Mar 12, 2004, at 1:07 PM, Vernon Schryver wrote:

> That would be relevant to your situation if you had any contract
> with those intermediaries, or if you had deigned to buy real Internet
> access instead of some sort of data service that happens to use
> TCP/IP and parts of the Internet.

I don't care to argue over terminology, but when I say "Internet" I am 
explicitly including the consumer-level services that are what 99.99% 
of human beings think of as the Internet.
> That is a straw man.  Other than some governments, no third parties
> are interferring with your mail.  There are ISPs acting in accordance
> with contracts with their customers to block your mail.  You are
> demanding that ISPs violate their agreements with their customers
> and pass your mail.

And *that* is disingenious.  A take-it-or-leave it contract from a near 
monopoly is not a meaningful contract.

> While PTTs do regulate telephone service, Internet service is not
> regulated that way in for most citizens of Western countries.  Besides,
> equivalents of the filtering you are complaining about is available
> from telephone companies.  Qwest sells various kinds of call blocking.
> By your reasoning, it is ok for Qwest to block telemarketing calls
> with inevitiably grossly inaccurate CID filters but not for Qwest to
> block email with much more accurate mechanisms.

If they sell it to me and I *choose* to buy it, that's one thing.  If 
I'm given no alternative it's something else.  -- Nathaniel