>It seems there's a need to balance interests among different groups of >users. What is your proposed solution to prevent emission of >spam via dialup, if you propose to discourage the DUL? (My >proposal imposes a positive duty of care of ISPs to prevent >emission of spam, so I am quite concerned about this.) Your question assumes that the DUL is actually a meaningful anti-spam mechanism. It is not. So I should turn it around and ask you to state exactly why you believe otherwise. That said, I can say that it's no big deal for an ISP to determine which of its customers had a given IP address at a certain time, as this information is generally logged anyway. So allowing direct SMTP in no way makes it harder to trace a spam complaint back to a user account. >Behavioral Studies 1 teaches that responsibility is ensured only >by accountability, and accountability entails traceability. What >is your alternative to ensure traceability for abusive transmissions? I have just stated it. >Could you explain this please? The difficulty I foresee is that >ISPs are under legal obligations to prevent their property from being >abused to injure others. (Unfortunately many ISPs don't fulfill >their obligation diligently as of now, but that is another story.) >If the ISP chooses system-wide blocking, how could it be disabled >on a per-user basis without facilitating spamming? Certainly. Just about every ISP (except for those run as fronts by the spammers themselves) has an acceptable use policy that prohibits spamming along with activities that are actually illegal. Nearly every ISP maintains an "abuse" address to which complaints can be sent. I use these addresses myself on a regular basis, either directly or through spamcop. I see nothing wrong with holding users accountable after the fact for spamming or illegal activities. My only problem is with pre-emptive mechanisms that block perfectly legitimate applications and hurt people who have never spammed or broken the rules. It is as if George W had dropped a 10 megaton nuke on Baghdad, saying that stopping Saddam was more important than avoiding "collateral damage" to the civilian population. When you're so powerful that no one is in a position to stop you, you can easily invent your own justifications for anything you do. >Well in fact collateral damage is the ONLY THING that motivates >certain scum ISPs to reform, as has been repeatedly proven. I can >give you the cites if you like. So collateral damage may have to >be viewed as an interim necessity given the low ethical standards >of some of the leading firms in the industry. I have no problem with blacklists that contain IP addresses of hosts actually known to generate or relay spam, as long as the owners of those hosts are given the opportunity to fix the problem and be removed from the blacklist. These are relatively narrow, focused and effective mechanisms. Again, my only problem is with mechanisms that are claimed to fight spam but in reality do little but hurt many perfectly legitimate users. Phil