[11815] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: NYTimes 'green card' article
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark R. Ludwig)
Thu Apr 21 03:37:03 1994
To: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <199404201815.NAA21715@neuron.cs.tamu.edu>
from "Willis Marti" on Wed, 20 Apr 1994 13:15:12 CDT.
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 1994 17:27:34 -0700
From: "Mark R. Ludwig" <Mark-Ludwig@uai.com>
>>>>> "Willis" == Willis Marti <willis@cs.tamu.edu> writes:
Willis> And part of discussion on this list is to figure out how to
Willis> make those exploiters 'pay' the 'cost' -- that too is what
Willis> commercialism is all about.
Aye, there's the rub! It's hard to quantify, let alone recover, the
cost of this stuff, excepting those who pay variable charges for
access. Even then it's hard to convincingly complain he should pay
you for the money you wasted reading the advertisement, because
there's already so much garbage through which one must wade that
incidents such as this are barely a blip on the noise curve, IMHO.
Part of the problem is the indirection. For example, I would have a
_very_ difficult time recovering costs from someone logically and
physically distant, and with whom I have no legal relationship.
It might be possible for ISPs to add clauses allowing them to charge
back to the offending customer some measure of the trouble which the
customer causes. Barry? Karl? Do you have anything like this in
your standard adhesions?
In this case, if such a clause existed in the adhesion the lawyer
signed to get the timesharing account (why it probably isn't a
"contract" is a separate topic), it might be possible for the ISP to
get back the staff costs of dealing with the onslaught of e-mail as
well as whatever opportunity costs the provider forwent because said
e-mail degraded the service for the rest of the customers, etc. It's
still not trivial to quantify these costs.$$
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