Previous Politech message: "Larry Lessig bets his job on spam law -- with me as judge?" http://www.politechbot.com/p-04286.html --- From: "Jim Harper" <jim.harperat_private> To: <declanat_private> Subject: RE: Larry Lessig bets his job on spam law -- with me as judge? Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2003 11:44:06 -0500 Lessig's bet is nearly risk-free. "ADV:" legislation is very unlikely. More importantly, though, it's ham-handed. Along with reducing spam, why not rate spam law on whether it preserves free speech rights? If you're not sympathetic to free speech, how about how well a spam law protects communications that consumers want and need (some of which are ADV:'s)? Has Lessig considered whether his proposal thwarts small business participation and competition in the online medium by creating disproportionate litigation risk? If there's going to be good spam law - not a foregone conclusion - it will come from considering all the interests at stake. Jim Jim Harper PolicyCounsel.Com --- Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 12:15:15 -0600 From: Chip Rosenthal <chipat_private> To: "James S. Tyre" <jstyreat_private> Cc: declanat_private, Lawrence Lessig <lessigat_private> Subject: Re: FC: Larry Lessig bets his job on spam law -- with me as judge? On Mon, Jan 06, 2003 at 05:42:39PM -0800, James S. Tyre wrote: > Declan, Larry, you may be interested in what Chip Rosenthal blogged about > that paper. > > http://www.unicom.com/chrome/a/000028.html > January 01, 2003 > An Unhelpful Analysis I'm thinking about blogging something about Larry's bet. (But I MUST finish writing my end-of-year spam stats article first. *sigh*) I'm going to take the position that the law Larry proposed may make spam levels *worse*. Here's why: data indicate a significant rise in spam levels over the past year. (I'm currently crunching some numbers, hoping I can measure this effect.) I believe there are two reasons for this. One is the recession. The other is due to the increasing effectiveness of filtering. As filters get more effective, spammers pump out more and more messages, trying to push their crap through the shrinking sieve. Labelling may provide for the most effective filtering yet, driving spammers to flood at levels unimagined. So while Larry's proposal may reduce what lands in your inbox, the servers are going to *choke*. That's because the SMTP mail protocol requires that the server receive the complete message before it can be inspected for tags. So servers will be driven into the ground accepting and discarding millions of messages a day, all with proper spam labels. Here is the flaw in Larry's propsal: it assumes reasonable, rational people. As effectiveness of spam decreases, the less likely a reasonable, rational person would use it. The problem is that people who advertise by spam aren't reasonable, rational people. They are morons who believe in work-at-home pyramid scams and that apricot seeds cure cancer. They don't do efficacy calculations. They just look at the cost. They don't care if spam has a 1/1mil capture rate, just so long as it's cheap. And with its nearly-zero marginal cost, they'll just adjust their spam levels upwards as necessary. The spam problem results from the false economies in the system. The solution to the spam problem has to be either: 1) rewrite the protocols so that spammers can't game the system, or 2) offset the false economies. I don't think a proposal such as Larry's, which does neither, will be as helpful as we may like. I think legislation is the right solution, but labelling isn't it. Spam represents pollution of a public resource, and we need regulations and financial penalties appropriate for protecting that endangered resource. -- Chip Rosenthal * chipat_private * http://www.unicom.com/ "Why look back in anguish when we can look forward to the future with cynicism?" * http://www.unicom.com/chrome/a/000029.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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