From: Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 1998 15:06:57 +0800
To: cypherpunks@ssz.com (Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer)
Subject: Re: Should the Feds ban spam? (fwd)
Message-ID: <199802210709.BAA28924@einstein.ssz.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text



Forwarded message:

> Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 22:36:38 -0800
> From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
> Subject: Re: Should the Feds ban spam? (fwd)

> >At 16:36 -0600 2/15/98, Jim Choate wrote:
> >>Newspaper editors work according to policies and trusts empowered by the
> >>owners of the paper. They are allowed as a function of the views of the
> >>owners to express that choice as an *employee* of those owners. Those
> >>policies do not apply to the readers as would happen in the case of an ISP.
> >>Unless you propose that each person should have multiple accounts at
> >>multiple ISP's.
> 
> At 06:43 PM 2/15/98 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> >This is so incoherent that it's not possible to turn into a positive statement.

It means the employee's of the paper act as agents of the owners and not as
direct right-holders of the paper itself. In other word the job of the
editor, not his civil right as an owner, is what gives them the privilige at
the behest of the owners to edit what appears in the paper.

The only people who have a right to 'freedom of the press' are the people
who *own* the press. Employees don't have rights, per se, in this only
duties and responsibilities to carry out the desires of the owners.

Now if we address the issue, as some proposed, of ISP's having 'global
filtering' rules (eg "All cyberpromo.com accounts are filtered") *and* the
purchaser may for some reason *want* to recieve cyberpromo.com traffic they
are left with the only option of going to a second (or third, or ...) ISP
in order to get what they want.

> I found it pretty easy to parse, though incorrect -
> Jim assumes that each person will only deal with one ISP,

Not at all, I assume that people can deal with as many ISP's as they have
money for. What I do assume is that if we expect ISP's to filter spam they
have only a single option open to them. That option is to impliment a
filtering policy based upon an interview and oversight by the purchasers of
that account. This will increase the costs of Internet access far above the
current levels. This increase in cost will naturaly strain already limited
budgets and force some people to drop secondary (or tertiary, or ...)
accounts because of this basic access price increase.

> and that getting spam filtering from that ISP means turning
> over control of all your incoming mail/news to the ISP.

Not at all, the purchaser defines a spam policy that the ISP impliments.
Whatever filtering the recipient wants to do over and above this is left
unremarked. However, for an ISP to filter ones email to determine if it fits
the policy the purchaser/recipient has defined they *will* be required to
review *all* incoming mail. Otherwise how do they determine if it fits one
of the categories that were defined in the contract, whether we look at it
from the perspective of what to filter or what to pass along and let the
customer process on their own.


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