Re: [anti-spam-wg] Proposal for a legal solution to spam

[der Mouse <]

> http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_06/neednt_eat_spam/

> The author is arguing that ISPs, ICANN, RIRs and legal authorities
> should move away from a technological approach to combatting spam,
> and use what powers they have to enforce good behaviour.

You ICANN and the RIRs are doing anything technological about
combatting spam?  I haven't seen evidence of it.

I agree (with your summary; I haven't read the thing).  Responsibility
needs to be concomitant with authority; just as an ISP needs to
ultimately accept responsibility for how its address space is used
(responsibility which it may initially pass on to its customers, but
needs to pick up again if the customer isn't taking it), a RIR needs to
similarly accept responsibility when address space assignees don't.

But that probably won't happen, because the rot goes clear to the top:
ICANN refuses to do anything, and everybody else sees it as a cash cow
to have the privilege of assigning address space (and charging for it)
without having to accept the responsibility that needs to go along with
it.  Responsibility?  You mean, like actually doing things?  But that
would *cost*!  Sorry, buckos.  The world doesn't work that way,
anywhere, not for long.

What we have is not a sustainable state.  Any large mismatch between
power and responsibility leads to abuses, and spam is just the
beginning of the abuses that'll come down the pipe until the mismatch
is fixed.

> Do people think there is any weight to his argument?  Or that what he
> says may constitute a threat to the way in which LIRs and RIRs
> operate.

Yes and yes.  (Your summary of) his argument is dead on, IMO - and it
*is* a threat to the way the address space hierarchy operates, because
it operates on the lazy "I want the privilege without the
responsibility" model, and that would not survive such a change.

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