A Return to Internet Greatness

"[T]here is no chance that the Internet will return to its old level of user-friendliness until lawmakers recognize that the decision to leave it unregulated was a serious, ideologically driven mistake." -- The Weekly Standard

Comments

[Russ]

Why is this is technical issue? It could just be a market issue. Since email is essentially free, spam happens. And if you think you are paying for email, complain to your ISP about how much spam you're getting and threaten to drop their service. This may not be a panacea, but it is certainly going to be more effective than stupid unenforceable legislation.

[Jack Wayne]

Actually, I AM paying for email because I pay $50/mo for RoadRunner. I don't think I should get spammed the same way I don't think I should have telemarketers calling my home. This problem will be solved without the government getting involved.

[martin]

What's that? A call for more regulation from conservatives?
Now they're stealing that issue too from the liberals! ROFL! And will probably still get away with branding the Democrats for wanting to regulate everything.
What a bunch of mean-spirited, lying SOBs. Just keep pushing your lies and distortions until they become truths.
They will never let the facts get in the way of a perfectly stupid opinion.

The first advice i would give the Weekly Standard is to get rid of that asinine Java script WARNING. The pages work just fine without script. And DO try to make them a little more friendly to us 56k users. 250 kb for the home page is quite a bit!
You see, the market place doesn't seem to work for many folks, we can't get anything quicker than 56k, (regulated down to half that for upload), Adelphia by reguation having the cable monopoly. And they went bust, no money to invest. It all went into the owners' pockets. Long live the regulated market place!

[Russ]

Martin's onto something. You can't switch cable ISP's if they're regulated to only allow one company to service your area. Perhaps regulation causes spam?

[Hal E.]

Hmmm ... so the government SHOULDN'T regulate things like, oh, say, air pollution (too much of a burden on business), but SHOULD regulate the Internet? I wonder if the folks at the Weekly Standard pulled any muscles twisting themselves into an ideological contortion like that.

[JDM]

"[T]here is no chance that the Internet will return to its old level of user-friendliness until lawmakers recognize that the decision to leave it unregulated was a serious, ideologically driven mistake."

This quote is being taken completely out of context. The article is advocating changes in the law for the specific purpose of ending spam. The quote above doesn't refer to a general call for government regulation of the Internet, merely enough to make it maximally useful. To act as if this is hypocricy is ludicrous. Few conservatives are against all regulations which makes businesses and society more efficient.

[son volt]

I used to get fifty spams a day. Even that nuisance level wouldn't justify government action to remedy it. But instead of deleting them, I painstakingly "unsubscribed" to all of them. Now I'm down to about ten a day.

[David]

Nice editing! Let's pretend that Caldwell wasn't talking about ways to deal with the SPAM problem
(a problem that costs business millions of dollars
to deal with). Libertarians, the self-described
champions of "reason," once again protecting us from any and all forms of protection. It may be that people left unregulated by the government would act in a way that is beneficial to self and society. Your intentionally misleading clip, however, only supports your opponents' position.
Please try to be fair in the future.

[Jag]

I get spammed daily...I would rather tolerate it, and use technological solutions, than have massive ineffective government control of internet commerce.

Remember, there are actually no formal "legal" property rights on the net, simply because there is no worldwide law enforcement agency with jurisdiction over the entire internet to enforce those property rights. Any individual or business who uses the net should know that, and be prepared to bear the costs of protecting their "domain" by technological means, just as in any wild or untamed part of the world you ought to be prepared to defend what is yours by whatever means are at your disposal. Imposing the cost of self-protection on businesses on the net is not unreasonable, as access to the email is almost free, or of negligible cost when compared with the opportunities that the email provides. If you are unwilling to bear those costs yourself, how is it fairer for government (funded by other people's money) to bear those costs? Blocking spam in the current system imposes the biggest costs on businesses and large websites, which seems fair to me, as they also use the largest proportion of net bandwidth. Private individuals face, at most, a few minutes' annoyance.

Government regulation of the internet would be:
a.) impossible, as any regulation must have global authority.
b.) ineffective.
c.) discourage or disincentivize people from finding technological solutions to spam.
d.) be paid for, at least in part, by those who, otherwise, would not face any real financial costs from spam.
e.) in the long run, lead to government intrusion into commerce and communications on the net.

To illustrate point D, take, say James Lileks, who has a large website and, I am sure, receives plenty of junk email. Another journalist at the same income level who does not maintain a website, would be, by taxes, expected to contribute equally to "The War on Spam" as James Lileks, although the latter obviously is affected by spam much more.

[scott]

God knows, there is nothing more user-friendly than government regulations...

[quaker120]

More reasonable solutions from people who actually know what they're talking about can be found at: http://www.irtf.org/asrg/

[Muness Alrubaie]

I wonder how Christopher Caldwell proposes to deal with spam from other countries.

Any regulation will be limited by legal reach. It'd do no good to ban spam if someone could still do it from Singapore.

The problem is a technical one, not a legal one. I personally manage a mail server where the technical solution (SpamAssassin, using distributed spam detection, rbl's as well as Bayesian filtering) works well.

Any regulation dealing with the internet will suffer from the same difficulties. By its nature, it is an international system. Hence, no legal structure will stop it. Unless it is actively enforced by every country, something I don't foresee happening for spam; governments have too many other things to do. The idea of "postage for email" is also non-sensical. For technical reasons, I am sure we'd end up with a system were legitimate email costs money, and spam comes in as it does now.

The core point of the article may be summarized in the author's own words "Libertarianism has proved an attractive creed for the Internet generation in its lifestyle variant of live-and-let-live. But as a market system it has proved a flop." I for one would like to hear Caldwell's justification for such a conjecture.

[JD Weiner]

Wow, what an amazing crock. Caldwell appears to use "libertarian" as shorthand for "stuff I don't like." I would write to him and ask him what part of theft of services and fraudulent advertising he considers part of libertarian thinking, but by his own admission he pretty much doesn't read his email. I guess he hasn't bothered to try out any of the technological solutions he derides. Not surprising, given that his grasp of technology seems singularly weak: "logged on to AOL's spam report", "programs called Jeems", "spam packets", etc.

His conclusions are also unsupported by any evidence he cites. "Spam is a big problem" therefore "the internet is unusable" and "we must tax the internet". Given his lack of technological expertise, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he seems unaware that much spam these days comes from places outside the US and Europe, places which are not likely to give a flying fig about our "Internet taxes" or fraud laws - if anything, taxing email will drive spammers to other countries where it will be harder to find and prosecute them. Not to mention that when one "taxes email", what is one taxing, exactly? Hitting the "send" button? Sending "MAIL from:" or "RCPT to:"? SYN packets to port 25?

[Plutarck]

Oh yes, this is very sensible you know, because the entire Internet consists of entirely illegal music, video, and game trading...and email. Yes, clearly it is just a massive failure that ever so needs the government - who's military can't even track jet fighters, rocket launchers, and tanks as well as Wal-Mart can track tubes of toothpaste - to step in and take care of things.

Because, you know, the government does so well with technology, and surely they could do better than the system in place which is responsible for perhaps the fastest evolution/revolution in technology and they way people live their lives In The Entirety of Human History.

Sounds about right to me.

[david f]

wait a sec --

this magazine, that has claimed to be a "small government, classical Liberal" one in the past is now calling for regulation when it doesn't like something????? gasp.

cheers,
drf

[dude]

david f - I don't think the neocons at the Weekly Standard even pretend to be "small government" conservatives any more.

Some republicans still pay the concept lip-service, but it seems to be a lost cause, pretty much. (At least until the next time we have a democratic President and a republican Congress).

[david f]

hey dude! (do you likje Kaluha, too? "watch it, i have a beverage" -- that was a great movie!)

you're right on that one: whichever side controls congress will adopt any buzzphrase to smack the opposite-party president whenever possible. actually, an excellent example of your thought comes from our man, Pat Lehey himself. he's worried about "civil liberties" now. good for you, pat.

thanks!
drf

[Jim]

You know, I'm sure the internet was a lot easier to use ten years ago, when hardly anyone was on it. Now the problem is that you have to sift through a lot more data (including spam liberally in the definition of 'data') to find what you are looking for. This is a technical issue not a legal one. In any case, I'm sure regulation and taxation can have the desired goal, to drive users from the net. I can't see how this benefits anyone, however.

[david f]

but...

here's what the internet gives us!

http://www.happytreefriends.com/index.html

oh so wrong. sick. awful. naughty. terrible.

heh heh heh,
drf

[Rick Barton]

The "The Weekly Standard" isn't "small government" or "classical Liberal" or anything of the sort. It's just weak. Let us impose some "market" regulation and not purchase that deceiving, anti-intellectual trash.

[Rick Barton]

They also aren't "conservative".