Re: [dvd-discuss] EFF opposes blacklisting spammers

[Jeme A Brelin <jeme(at)brelin.net>]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Bryan Taylor wrote:
> --- Jeme A Brelin <jeme@brelin.net> wrote:
> > A decision was made (behind closed doors and with many a greased palm) to
> > privatize the publicly developed entity known as the internet.
> 
> Curiously, this occured just before the enormous explosion of the
> internet,

"Curiously", it also happened just as NCSA Mosaic became widely available,
14.4Kbps modems became available, home PC market saturation reached had
just made a leap and universities had just started encouraging email in
non-computer science students.

> and is almost uniformly agreed to be a good thing.

Maybe in your circles, not in mine.

In my country, we still pay lip service to the concept of democracy.  And
secret meetings and bribery that end in public assetts being taken from
the public are in direct violation of the public trust.

Also note that the type and manner of internet communication declined
sharply following this change.  The drive by the new private backbone
carriers was to provide for commerce at the expense of community.  Spam
was introduced.  And the great old web and gopher sites that carried
information freely distributed by hobbyists and specialists became
obscured in a morass of keyword-loaded pay sites and sales pitches.  
USENET, for a while, became all but unusable for all the spam and
cross-traffic.  Archie and Veronica were just too useful in getting things
for free to survive in a commerce-driven network.  And machines on the
network that are passive and provide no services far outnumber those that
do provide services where once they were a small minority.

I've recommended it before (I think to you), but I'll do it again.  Pick
up and read a copy of Robert W. McChesney's "Rich Media, Poor Democracy"
and read his chapter on the internet.

> There is rather healthy competition between the telcos and backbone
> bandwidth has grown at a pace that is truly staggering.

Is this the healthy competition that's causing lay-offs across the
industry and conglomeration at an unprecedented rate?  Where CLECs
(competitive local exchange carriers) are rapidly going extinct as they
are bought out by Time Warnet Telecoms, Qwest and AT&T?  Where the local
ISP is now a "member" of Earthlink and AOL disks literally litter our
streets?

Yes, bandwidth is more plentiful and cheaper.  But socially, we're no
better off.  The power is still in the hands of the same old powerful and
the public has lost its means of creating community via the internet.

> The idea that the government should have kept the internet socialized
> is completely out of synch with the wishes of the public.

The wishes of the public are shaped by AT&T, Sony, AOL/Time Warner, Disney
and GE.  Even if the personal opinions of the majority conflict with what
they present as the "wishes of the public".

Privatizing the internet has brought no real improvement to our society or
culture.  It did not improve the general standard of living (in fact, the
naive faith in ludicrous dot-coms helped speed us to the current
depression).  It did not enlighten us, generally, and decrease
intolerance, fear or ignorance.  We are not more just, kind, loving,
healthy, or strong.

> > In privatization, the interexchanges and backbone channels were placed in
> > the hands of the few.  And those few were given the power to silence the
> > many in a formerly public forum.
> 
> Are you saying that the blacklisting occurs at the telco level? Isn't
> it done at the ISP level?

I'm not just writing about email here.  The ability to provide web
services on a particular machine was once inextricable from the set of
abilities that allowed one to send mail or browse the web.  The
peer-to-peer nature of the network changed when NSPs (those that provide
network connections to ISPs, most of them backbone carriers
themselves) realized they can impose assymetrical bandwidth restrictions
that make it cheap to listen, but expensive to speak.

> I think the backbones avoid content based screening to preserve their
> legal status as a carrier.

Ah, but an assymetrical connection is CONTENT NEUTRAL.  You can say
whatever you want, if you pay for the right to speak.  We're not
restricting speech based on content, just on ability to pay.

And yet, this is an artificial restriction at that level.  Inbound and
outbound traffic are passing the same full-duplex interfaces.

Yet, 1Mbps upstream costs a hell of a lot more than 1Mbps downstream for
an end-user.

And that's BECAUSE OF content-neutrality.  They can't charge you more if
you're commercial than if you're an individual... they can't make
commercial speech more expensive... so they make all speech expensive,
safe in the knowledge that commerce will pony up.

> The privatization of the internet lead immediately to a proliferation
> of ISPs including many, many small ISP's.

Yep.  How many are left?  The "free market" has done what it always
does: brought about oligopoly and monopoly and destroyed competition for
all but those who can afford the high barriers to entry.

> You should start one if you are really worried about the problem.

What do you think this is, 1994?

I know literally dozens of people who started small ISPs and absolutely
all of them are out of business today.  Mostly they ended up closing at a
loss because the RBOC was shafting them for telephone lines (just biding
their time and keeping competition at bay until they could get the
deregulation they needed to provide service themselves) or a nationwide
megalith was providing service at a loss to drive out competition.  A
couple of those people ended up selling their (unprofitable) business to a
larger ISP or just a wealthier one that was hoping to be the Last Man
Standing.

In the end, it was predominantly those who started out on top that stayed
on top and competition was totally destroyed because, as we all know, it's
bad for business.

> Until then, you have no right to set ISP policy other than to pick
> which ISP you want to do business with.

I do business with one of the few privately owned ISPs left in the world
and their terms of service are the most liberal I've ever seen.  They
encourage their broandband users to run services and charge no more for
the privilege.  They are forced to provide assymetrical bandwidth by their
upstream provider and as long as business sees web presence as a
necessity, that won't change.  Speaking up will still be for those who can
afford it.

> > The freedom of the few must be sacrificed for the greater freedom of
> > the many.
> 
> Freedom of "the few" is not at odds with freedom of the many. You have
> a screwed up definition of freedom, it appears.

Some freedoms, less likely to be carried out, are sacrificed for greater,
more common freedoms.  How about that?

We sacrifice our freedom to slay each other in cold blood for the freedom
to walk amongst one another with less fear.

We sacrifice the freedom to be deceitful so that we can enjoy freedom of
information.

We sacrifice the freedom to block other people's mail so that we may enjoy
the freedom of assured mail delivery.

> Your world where some elite body sits in judgement over whose freedom
> is most important will inevitably lead to less freedom overall, since
> it depends on decision making that isn't grounded in any process that
> legitimizes its decisions.

We have exactly such a system today.  In fact, every social structure is
designed under exactly such a principle.  Some freedoms are sacrificed
(declared sin, crime, or what have you) so that others can be guaranteed.

> I imagine what would happen if this ever got started is a replay of
> the American Revolution -- the King, or Uber-Court, or whoever you
> pick to broker freedom, would slowly take freedom away from different
> groups until enough of them were ready to use force to overthrow it.
> The biggest threat to freedom is overreach by government.

The biggest threat to freedom is consolidation of power.  That is
agreed.  But that power need not be governmental.

In fact, a properly designed government is resistant to such consolidation
because of its mandate as the agency of the public.  The power of
government is DELEGATED by all the people.  And it should always be
possible to remove your power from the power of government.  This is the
idea behind the Second Amendment, for example, or the New Hampshire State
Constitution's Article Ten (Right of Revolution).

Private power, that is, power derived from means other than willfull
delegation by those who yield to the power, is the greatest threat to
freedom.

In this way, when public or communal property is scarce, economic power
becomes greater than all other powers.  One's very survival depends on
one's economic success.  There is no more opportunity to withdraw from the
world of commerce and retreat to a life without property.  There is no
more land onto which people can simply move and live in self-sustenance.  
No, the only way out is to buy your way out.  There's only one catch, and
that is Catch-22.

> > With the GPL, the few who distribute modified software lose the right to
> > distribute programs without source code but everyone gains the right to
> > receive source code for all of their programs.
> 
> I don't get your GPL analogy at all. The GPL only grants things. It
> does not take anything away. There is no right to distribute a
> derivitive work.

It was a comparison with the BSD license, not with plain copyright.

The GPL removes the right (that the BSD license grants) to distribute
without providing source code, but gives all recipients the freedom (which
the BSD license denies) to acquire source code.

Pretend that existing copyright incorporated a BSD-style distribution
right "unless other distribution terms are applied".  Got that?

> > The few who control networks give up your right to block the email of
> > others in exchange for gaining the right of all to have their email
> > properly delivered.
> 
> Your picture of this kind of rights brokering can only exist with the
> kind of "greased palm" deal making that the government has no place
> being involved in.

Huh?  Who has to bribe their way into exclusive deals to stop blocking
email?

> If I want to filter somebody's email or contract with an email
> provider that does it for me, then I have that right and I'll do it
> over your objection, thank you very much.

Woah... you can contract with an email provider that filters YOUR mail
(outbound or inbound), but the free exchange of information and ideas
demands that you do nothing to impede the progress of mail to which you
are not an explicit party (recipient or sender).

Just as you expect your mail to be delivered to the recipient (whereupon
you also respect the right of the recipient to redirect to /dev/null),
others should be able to expect the same.

All I'm saying is that spam filtering should be done by recipients, not by
those who provide transit.

It's real nice of those who run mail services to offer an easy way for
their users to filter their mail.  It's really not nice to filter it
without their express permission.

> The only situation where this could get out of hand is if antitrust
> concerns arise because of collusions between all email providers. That
> possibility appears absurdly remote. So long as the consumer has a
> real choice of what filtering scheme to employ (including no
> filtering), regulation is extremely improper.

Please stop referring to people as "consumers".  I am not a gaping mouth
or a bulging wallet.  I am a person, a sovereign, and, in various cases,
an email recipient or sender.

I do not simply CONSUME an internet connection.  It's a two-way street and
I use and provide.

That said, I agree that an email RECIPIENT should be able to choose what
sort of filtering is employed.  But I think that those who provide mail
services should be REQUIRED to allow individual users to request
unfiltered mail.  Otherwise, we end up in a situation where the largest
ISPs filter and it's not ENOUGH of a market differentiator to compel
people to use a different service and the filtering is, in some sense,
unavoidable.

J.
-- 
   -----------------
     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme@brelin.net
   -----------------
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