RBL quandry - opinions hereby solicited

Tue Nov 17 19:04:43 UTC 1998

At 11:20 AM 11/17/1998 -0600, Phil Howard wrote:
>Dean Anderson wrote:
>
>> their customers.  Not potential future customers. Existing customers.  They
>> didn't buy this list from somewhere. They asked for, and required customers
>> to give this information, and to give them permission to send email.
>
>That's not asking for it.  That's demanding it.  No e-mail ... no domain.
>Until NSI does not have an actual monopoly on TLDs, then it is a form of
>legalized extortion.  You can prove to me otherwise by registering a domain
>in a gTLD either w/o giving any addresses.

I guess you can register your domains under .US from now on... I hear they
have a better policy.

By your logic, all business is legalized extortion:  "Cisco is the only
vendor that has this product I need. But they won't give it to me unless I
pay..."  I suppose the operative word is LEGALIZED.

I've criticized NSI when they deserve criticism. This time, they aren't
being unreasonable.   Once again, the anti-spammers are going on an
extreme, trying to tell NSI that it can't contact its domain registrants to
sell them additional domain related services.

NSI isn't trying to sell pizza or computers, or toner. They are trying to
sell services that are probably of interest to domain registrants, who
registered domains with NSI.  I don't see what's wrong with that.

I've got to wonder if _some_ of the people complaining here are just
worried about NSI competing against their own domain/nameservice/bind
consulting services. Or perhaps have some other ax to grind.

		--Dean

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           Plain Aviation, Inc                  dean at av8.com
           LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP          http://www.av8.com
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