[9516] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Murkowski anti-spam bill could be a problem for ISPs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John R Levine)
Sat May 24 16:19:20 1997
Date: Sat, 24 May 1997 16:08:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: John R Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
To: Deepak Jain <deepak@jain.com>
cc: Owen DeLong <owen@DeLong.SJ.CA.US>, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.970524142959.25216A-100000@aries.ai.net>
> > > * The FTC can discipline misbehaving ISPs.
> > > * Various penalties for unsigned ads, for ISPs that don't provide
> > > filtering, for spammers who continue to send ads after receiving a remove.
> >
>
> Don't these two lines cause everyone a little bit of grief?
No, the cause some people (not the spammers) an enormous amount of grief.
> 1) What can the FTC do to discipline an ISP?
Levy large fines after several years of delay.
> 2) Why should ISPs be required to filter? Wouldn't it make sense that
> customers would decide if they want to make a purchase based on *if*
> filtering were available?
Of course.
> By a real email address, what do we mean? One that doesn't bounce? One
> that actually goes back to the spammer? What if every 48hrs he/she
> rotates email addresses so the spammer can ignore the remove requests
> because (simply put) it is coming from a different spammer (and *still*
> send untagged email)?
Oh, you don't even have to work that hard. If you have to have filtering
anyway, you can expect many people to have the filter auto-send a remove
messge in response to all spam, so a spammer signs up for a dial-up account,
sends 100,000 spams, gets back 25,000 remove responses, of which 24,900 fall
on the floor because he's blown his e-mail quota. I said this bill had
problems.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner
Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47
