"Default" Internet Service

Tue Jun 15 00:14:40 UTC 2004

On Mon, 14 Jun 2004, Owen DeLong wrote:

> > Point I am making is that the post office is not responsible and/or
> > liable  for the content of the packages they deliver. However, if they
> > deliver  packages that are obviously visibly dangerous to the recipient
> > they have  an obligation to investigate and not deliver the package.
> >
> Actually, there is some debate about that.  However, there are also
> strong boundaries on that.  The obligation you speak of applies to
> things that endanger human life.  If you send a diskette mailer to
> someone with the label "Diskette inside contains live computer virus",
> I bet the post office will probably deliver it.  That's every bit
> as harmful as the packets you're complaining about the ISPs delivering.

Actually postal and freight services require you to label dangerous 
goods and may not accept some types of dangerous goods to start with.
If they believe you've sent dangerous goods that has not been 
labeled as such they have the right to return the packege to sender
or conduct their own investigation and delay the shipment.

So in a sense if you send somebody an envelope and specify that it 
contains "dangerous white powder" and they actually accepted the shipment, 
they should deliver it. But if they see that it contains this powder and 
its labeled "love letter", then they should in fact open the envelope and 
test it or return it to sender to get more clarification about what it is.

Now that's great in theory, obviously in practie this does not work and
viruses do not get labeled as such. However my feeling is that most users
don't at all object to ISP checking their received email for viruses, 
eventhough it maybe invasion of their private mailbox. Similarly I don't 
think its outside the scope of ISP on the origin side of email to do 
similar checks on behalf of the sender.

> >> Most residential ISPs get paid the same whether the customer spews
> >> abuse or not.  Their costs go up some when they get abuse complaints
> >> and when abuse starts using more bandwidth, so, for the most part, most
> >> residential ISPs have no incentive to support abuse, but, not enough
> >> incentive to pay to staff an abuse department sufficiently to be truly
> >> responsive.  Further, most abuse departments don't get enough support
> >> from management when the sales and marketing departments come whining
> >> about how much revenue that abusing customer produces each month.

Its not like a big spamhaus that orders gigabit line, we're talking 
about individual dsl users most interested in cheapest kind of inet 
connection. There is not much revenue in that and cost of dealing with 
spam reports when their insecure system becomes zombie is much greater.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net