Spam Control Considered Harmful

Thu Oct 30 23:16:14 UTC 1997

>> And what will the FBI do when spammers leave the US...

This is really a red herring -- any spam control law, even one of the
bad ones like the Murkowski bill applies to any resident of the U.S.,
even if he hires someone in Moldova to send out his spam.  To escape
U.S. law the spammer has to move his entire business offshore.  In
practice we're unlike to see much offshore spam because the goal of
spammers is to collect money from suckers, and it's a whole lot harder
to do so if you don't have a domestic mailing address and bank
account.

Also, as others have pointed out, there aren't a lot of other
countries with low cost unmetered Internet connections and, other than
Canada, even those are connected to the U.S. by long, thin, expensive
undersea cables whose proprietors aren't likely to enjoy having them
filled with spam and angry responses.

-- 
John R. Levine, IECC, POB 640 Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869
johnl at iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, 
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