ISP Head Floats Plan To Legalize Spam
from the change-of-tactics dept
Barry Schein, last seen on these pages claiming that he didn't care if his spam filters blocked legitimate emails because spam was a "thousand times more horrible than you can imagine", has now come up with a proposal to "legalize" spam, by adding a cost infrastructure to it. Basically, the plan is that ISPs team up and offer fees to bulk mailers. If the mailers refuse, then the ISPs won't carry their traffic. This doesn't make much sense to me. If there was a way for ISPs to block spammers from sending mail to people on their networks... wouldn't they have done that already? The plan sort of brushes over that detail, though he does try to answer it in a convoluted way. Schein, not known for holding back his opinion, apparently says that if his plan isn't implemented all commercial ISPs will go bankrupt - or we'll all be inundated with continually increasing loads of spam.
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Will spam increase forever?
But will spam keep increasing forever? Our previous experience with other social problems suggest that problems come and go. In previous times, we had epidemics of crack cocaine, AIDS, or teen pregnancy, but they've shown a tendency to come and go. In the case of spam,
1. Continued improvements in spam blocking, technical and legal
2. Fewer people will be fooled by spam as time goes by
3. Future economic booms will lead spammers to seek better jobs.
Then give it a few more years, and when there is a generation of people not familiar with spam, they will be the next generation of suckers once again.
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Re: Will spam increase forever?
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No Subject Given
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