What's going on?

Sun Apr 20 20:11:47 UTC 1997

On Sun, 20 Apr 1997, Bill Becker wrote:

> > What has to be done is to get these third-party relay spammers
> > arrested, sued, and their heads hung out on poles for all to see and
> > give pause to others who might think of doing this.
> 
> Judges (in the US) would not do that because nobody dies or goes broke 
> as a result of spam.  It's merely annoying.  But even if US judges were 
> willing to nail spammers, the spammers would simply move out of their 
> jurisdictions.  With strict anti-spam laws in place, what would you do if 
> you were being spammed from a site in Liberia?  Same thing you do now.

And then in the US, we would get into first amendment issues, questions
about what is considered spam, and of course, my favorite and yours, how
to figure out how much money was lost from this spam.

You just can't do it. Once again I say, if governments start putting their
noses in places they don't, they are going to loose. Heck, can we consider
Internet users a race? Hey, maybe we can apply for Affirmative Action (US)
and collect benefits because we are a minority.

There are simply too many Internet users in too many countries which don't
agree on policy to regulate anything effectively. And are you REALLY ready
to give the government access to your routers so they can monitor traffic?

I don't think so.

Jordan

--
Jordan Mendelson     : www.wserv.com/~jordy/
Web Services, Inc.   : www.wserv.com