[12222] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: "Arizona Lawyers Form Company..."
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul A Vixie)
Tue May 10 07:20:57 1994
Date: Tue, 10 May 94 03:10:05 -0700
To: com-priv@psi.com
From: paul@vix.com (Paul A Vixie)
In-Reply-To: nelson@crynwr.com's message of 9 May 1994 22:54:03 -0700
(there are two replies contained herein)
Russell Nelson wrote:
>Every end site will put a C&S filter on their servers. Simple change to
>inetd (and probably smtpd aka sendmail). Somewhat less efficient than
>central filtering, but more democratic.
All 20,000,000 of them? I don't think so. C&S can live off the difference
between the total internet population and the subset that's able to protect
their own end systems from unwanted advertising. After all, C&S made a
``whole lot of money'' (quoting the newspaper article about their activities)
from their ``GREEN CARD LOTTERY'' ad, even though they were only offering to
charge $75 for sending people a form that the GPO would send them for free.
Whenever you consider a public policy issue you have to keep clearly in mind
the bone jarring apathy and ignorance of the average person. I don't mean
those as negative attributes -- the raw, observable fact of large societies
is that most people don't know and don't care. C&S can make money from that,
and they know it. I suspect that those of us who are aesthetcally put off by
this phirrana(sp)-like mentality are also secretly upset that it can work at
all. It would be much nicer, I'm sure we all agree, to live in a society of
people who strive to know and nearly always care. In such a society, C&S
would never even consider blasting their ads around because there would be
no profit in it. So what disgusts us -- _really_?
In any case, if we really want to do something about C&S and others like them,
depending on 20,000,000 hosts to install local filters isn't realistic. If
something effective is to be done to deter or negate these kinds of actions,
the effect will have to be global.
Next:
Roger Bohn wrote:
>I don't know which of the solutions discussed here is best. But I do know
>that to be useful in the long run, it better scale well as the number of
>perpetrators rises above 1E3.
How about 100% moderation, effectively forming a private network? The
moderators would have to be paid, but there's a large enough market base
now that I suspect it wouldn't cost the average subscriber much. I wish
Geoff had waited five more years before proposing IMN...
--
Paul Vixie
Redwood City, CA
decwrl!vixie!paul
<paul@vix.com>
