[10668] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
RE: Unsolicited Advertising - A Proposal
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tansin A. Darcos & Company)
Fri Mar 4 22:17:37 1994
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 94 23:20 EST
From: "Tansin A. Darcos & Company" <0005066432@mcimail.com>
To: Internet Engineering Task Force List <ietf@cnri.reston.va.us>
To: Everyone Else Lurking on Com Priv <com-priv@psi.com>
To: Comp Privacy <comp-privacy@uwm.edu>
To: Privacy Forum <PRIVACY@vortex.com>
To: Risks Digest <RISKS@csl.sri.com>
>From: Paul Robinson <TDARCOS@MCIMAIL.COM>
Organization: Tansin A. Darcos & Company, Silver Spring MD USA
---
Bob Raisch <raisch@internet.com>, writes to the IETF and
COM-PRIV lists, as follows:
> Recently, there have been a number of incidents where
> individuals or organizations have posted commercial advertising
> to a broad range of mailing lists and individual electronic mail
> addresses.
Err, Bob, If I hadn't seen *your company's announcement* of its
service, (which only appeared on the Internet), I wouldn't have
purchased the proxy domain service from your company. And I would
not have obtained a service I wanted, and your company would not
have made a sale. Yet perhaps 99% of the people who saw the
message probably did not have an interest in it.
> There is a marketing firm (J.S. McBride of Los Altos, CA) which
> is selling lists of electronic mail addresses which it has
> gathered from various online sources. By collecting names and
> addresses of all those who have posted to Usenet in the
> rec.bicycles newsgroup, for example, this firm would then sell
> this direct marketing mail list to companies selling bicycling
> products. This places anyone who participates in the online
> community at risk.
It's only junk mail if you have no interest in the material at
all.
I used to have a PO Box in Washington DC (70970) that got
tremendous amounts of mail, most of it advertising. The only
thing I considered "junk mail" was the stuff that was supposed to
go to the CIA, which had the PO Box above mine (70967), and that
the Post Office kept putting their mail in my box. (In case
anyone cares to correct me, I know the technical name of the
holder of that box is the "National Photo Interpretation Center"
but they did get mail marked "US CIA" so I think that counts.)
The advertising kept me aware of trends in the computer industry,
pricing, what is being sold, what is available. A very intensive
education in what is offered by the marketplace. For free.
> "Myth: No Unsolicited Advertising -- Fact: Unsolicited
> Advertising has been taking place on the Internet for quite
> some time, but you must proceed with caution"
I think the point at which I knew that I had arrived on the
Internet was when I got my first "Junk Email" message, which was
an ad for something, I forget what. The only reason I could have
gotten it is someone looked up my fidonet address in the WHOIS
directory, some three or four years ago.
The only reason I subscribed to MCI Mail is that our company got
a "junk telex" from them regarding their telex service.
Adversising is only "junk" if its concerning things that you don't want.
In fact, some people would classify visits by the Jehovahs
Witnesses as in the same class as Junk Mail, but no one expects
they make a lot of money selling Awake and Watchtower.
> And... "Unsolicited advertising (via email) is a gray area of
> Internet culture which requires very careful planning and
> execution to avoid the wrath of an extremely vocal community."
>...(Personally, I find this sentiment to be very distasteful in that
> it suggests that it is acceptable to steal from the individual
> and from the community as long as you do not "get caught.")
The tone of this implies that unsolicited mail sent to someone is
stealing from them. Or that unsolicited advertisements are. I
think these points are incorrect.
This seems to imply that there is *no place at all* for
advertising on the Internet. I think this statement in and of
itself to be false on its face. Now, perhaps some people who are
on rec.bicycles might not want advertisements, some people would
be interested in *factual* information about bicycles, including
the advertiser's specifications and prices.
Now maybe the point being that because one can duck messages in
newsgroups, while E-Mail has to be read to be noticed, the
question which needs to be asked is: what is the standard by
which you say that 'this activity is wrong' but 'this activity
isn't'?
Let's look closer: is ALL unsolicited E-Mail wrong? Well, first,
any time someone makes a public posting to a mailing list or news
group, they have to accept the fact that someone may send them a
personal response to their message, even if they have not asked
for one.
Second, any "public figure" is bound to get some e-mail from
someone who might ask them a question. Bill Gates of Microsoft
had his mailbox publicly postable by anyone on the Internet.
He's been getting over 3,000 messages a week since a story about
this came out; as such, he may have to have someone read his
E-Mail for him.
But let's define under what circumstances it is and is not
acceptable for someone to be sending out unsolicited mail to
another person, before we exclude the class of 'advertisement.'
What about advertisements posted to mailing lists or news groups?
Ads that are clearly marked as such in the first 5 lines? Ads
marked so in the Subject?
> This behavior is considered by many to be unacceptable for two
> primary reasons.
>
> --Many consider the sending of unsolicited advertising to be
> socially irresponsible and about as valuable to the public good
> as littering. This, I believe is partly based on the history of
> direct marketing in the actual world and its failure to
> effectively target narrow demographic groups.
The problem may be in part that there is an "anti-commercial"
bias with many of the people on the Internet, and with people in
general. Neglecting the fact that almost everything they own
they obtained as a result of advertising telling them about it or
raising a desire they were unaware of, is something quickly
forgotten. People seem to be unaware that supermarkets don't
fill themselves, it takes transport trucks, and an
infrastructure, and a demand for the product for it to show up.
But (in the given example) we have a precisely targeted audience
(bicyle enthusiasts) being targeted for something related to
them.
> --There is also the more measurable reason that any information
> one receives without request costs the recipient money -- both
> in terms of the time required to process and discard the
> information and in the actual cost of the reception itself.
I have to wonder how many services people are subscribing to that
charge for information that don't cause people to "vote with
their feet" to another place. MCI Mail doesn't charge to receive
internet mail. I also use Digital Express which doesn't charge
for mail received, only for online time in excess of 6 hours a
day. Your own Private Domain service doesn't cost me anything
for mail sent to domain TDR.COM.
Sprintmail is one of the ridiculous providers and extremely
expensive, costing 10c per K sent or received, plus monthly
charges. AT&T Mail has allegedly started charging 2c/K for
incoming Internet mail due to the volume involved. I think
charging for incoming mail is likely to be a relic of the past.
> Any complete solution to this problem would need to be deployed
> ubiquitiously and would require rather fundamental changes to the
> underlying mechanisms we use to send and receive email. Thus, I
> believe that a complete solution may not be easily attained -- at
> least, not until the deployment of IPng, which I believe
> represents a unique opportunity to "remake" many of the Internet
> services.
I have been thinking about this too, from a different and yet
complimentary angle. I hereby propose the creation of several
new "non geogaphic" internet base level domain names. The exact
3-letter combination need not be the same, but the idea should be
considered:
.SVC - Explicit Commercial Services (not just commercial domains, but
services which either operate over the Internet or use the
Internet as part of the service). This is supposed to be the
equivalent of the indication that U.S. Area Code 900 and prefix
976 numbers make. If you write to an address on a .SVC domain,
you consent to receiving ads; a service on an .SVC domain may
require you to pay for use (for which "payment" could include
receiving advertising.)
.PVT - Private Domains. Domain names where the entire domain belongs
to a single individual. Currently, people like myself, David
Sternlight, T William Wells, Paul Vixie, and others
that through context and usage, are running domain
names that only one person subscribes to, can only
use the .COM domain. If someone wants to display
a business presence, that's fine. But other people may want
to use a non-geographic name without having to declare themselves
a commercial site.
I had considered ".IND" as the other name for private domains,
except it might be confused with the ".INT" domain.
I think I need to find out who is in charge of the groups that
handle this issue that I can propose it for adoption as a
standard.
> I believe that with a simple change to the agency which
> actually receives mail at one's local site
Oh yeah, people just love rewriting their SENDMAIL.CF files, now
you suggest they accept patches for Sendmail when they don't even
know all the bugs in that program yet! (BSD Sendmail with the
IDA patches is probably the most common SMTP mail transport on
Internet, probably 90% of all sites using it, since it's free and
comes with source, which probably nobody touches.)
> coupled with some reasonable administrative support from an
> agency like the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), we can
> dramatically reduce the impact which unsolicited advertising has
> on the global Internet.
CERT can't even get out reports about spoilage in software
("bugs") in any reasonable fashion short of 'once every alternate
leap year' and until those security defects have been exploited
many times, by the assumption that "if we don't tell anyone about
a weakness, nobody else will find it," and yet you expect them to
take any interest in stopping Junk Email? In fact, I suspect the
whole purpose of creating CERT was the same reason there are Bar
Associations and Medical Boards: so that the incompetent
practicioners can hide their screwups privately. No wonder
people are hiring programmers from India.
> I also believe that CERT is a very appropriate agency for this
> project as I believe strongly that the proliferation of
> unsolicited advertising via electronic mail represents a real
> threat to the security of the global Internet --
Oh great, I can see the headlines; Imminent Death of the
Internet Predicted; Cause of death: Suicide by Unsolicited Junk
E-Mail Poisoning.
> security in the sense that any use of my local computing
> facilities without my express permission is theft of service.
Hmm. Have you tried to raise that issue in a court?
Seriously, have you tried to find someone who has sent
unsolicited advertisements as E-Mail and either filed charges or
sued them civilly?
I think you are doing a bit of a reach here, Mr. Raisch. :) (Pun
Intentional) Or let's try another tack; a company sends out
articles to people that contain ads along with textual material.
While courts have given some leeway to banning the distribution
of pure advertisements, an advertisement attached to an editorial
becomes material protected under the 1st Amendment. A court
would be very hard pressed to allow a 'theft of service' argument
to be used as a form of restraint, I suspect.
> This proposal contains three elements: administration,
> implementation, and distribution.
>
> The administration portion would require:
>
>--CERT act as a clearinghouse for announcements of incidents of
> this kind; ...collect reports on the receipt of unsolicited
> email;... list offenders which exceed some pre-defined limit;
> post this list both to a subscription list of interested
> parties as well as on Usenet.
I think CERT has more important things to ignore than Junk E-Mail; it's
probably kept busy enough ignoring calls for more information.
> --A method of guaranteeing the validity of this data would be used.
What criterion is to be used? And how do we know what is a mailing to
five or six people on a newsgroup versus mail from five or six people
complaining about unsoliticed mail?
> The implementation portion would require:
>
> --Patches be made in the standard "mail reception agents" which
> would allow them to refuse to deliver mail from certain
> indentified sources through the use of a stop-list or "kill
> file."
>
> --Development of adminstrative tools to manage the local kill file.
This assumes (1) the issue is serious enough to warrant this,
e.g. that the administrator take time out from more important
things like taking his secretary to a cheap motel during working
hours or banning everyone else from access to alt.sex, to put in
filters for unsolicited junk mail; (2) the sender can't change
its domain name every time it does a mailing, e.g ordering 50 or
60 different domain names and using ONE once a week, means a
whole year of uninterupted junk mailing before they have to think
up new ones. Of course, you can filter by the originating dotted
quad address, but then that's another story.
> CERT would not function -- and should not, in my opinion -- as an
> arbiter of "correct behavior", only as an informational resource
> which allows the community to implement their own local policy.
But your particular argument does _exactly_ that.
> Upon receipt of reports of violation, CERT would send out a
> statement to the sender (to be written by the community) that
> many sites on the global Internet consider such behavior to be
> unacceptable
I thought CERT would not be arbiter of acceptable behavior?
I note that your original message mentions the "SEATTLE WINDOWS
BACKGROUND" issue but misses the famous "Dave Rhodes
MAKE.MONEY.FAST" incident. Perhaps the reason you have to ignore
that one is the firestorm of protest that the recipients
generally get from such issues, which would make this campaign
totally unnecessary.
I think The Net can take care of itself quite nicely without
requiring the net.police to come in like the FBI at Waco, thank
you.
> I would be very interested in coordinating this effort and
> welcome comments, suggestions and offers of support.
I commend you on your efforts to offer the service you indicate
(the mailing list for reports). I doubt that we need anything as
drastic as your proposals suggest; I dislike the idea of being
bombarded by lots of advertisements, but I dislike content
restrictions and the implied threat of having an organization
whose charter is the examination of Criminal activities
investigating people or keeping lists of people because some
other people don't like their messages, a lot more.
How long before some unpopular religion like Wicca, Jehovah's
Witnesses', or the First Church of Satan is 'voluntarily banned'
from The Net?
---
Paul Robinson - PAUL@TDR.COM / TDARCOS@MCIMAIL.COM
Voted "Worst polluter of the (IETF) list" by Randy Bush <Randy@psg.com>
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