Murkowski anti-spam bill could be a problem for ISPs

Sat May 24 20:08:29 UTC 1997

> > > * The FTC can discipline misbehaving ISPs.
> > > * Various penalties for unsigned ads, for ISPs that don't provide 
> > >   filtering, for spammers who continue to send ads after receiving a remove.
> > 
> 
> Don't these two lines cause everyone a little bit of grief?

No, the cause some people (not the spammers) an enormous amount of grief.

> 1) What can the FTC do to discipline an ISP?

Levy large fines after several years of delay.

> 2) Why should ISPs be required to filter? Wouldn't it make sense that 
> customers would decide if they want to make a purchase based on *if* 
> filtering were available?

Of course.

> By a real email address, what do we mean? One that doesn't bounce? One 
> that actually goes back to the spammer? What if every 48hrs he/she 
> rotates email addresses so the spammer can ignore the remove requests 
> because (simply put) it is coming from a different spammer (and *still* 
> send untagged email)?

Oh, you don't even have to work that hard.  If you have to have filtering
anyway, you can expect many people to have the filter auto-send a remove
messge in response to all spam, so a spammer signs up for a dial-up account,
sends 100,000 spams, gets back 25,000 remove responses, of which 24,900 fall
on the floor because he's blown his e-mail quota.  I said this bill had
problems. 

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner
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