Brad Ideas - The true invention of the internet, redux, and Goodmail/Network Neutrality - Comments

Invention of the Internet

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 13:56:43 -0800

Here's a new twist on this question. Pretty funny

http://colonial-america.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_invention_of_the_in...

Mailbox providers, who

Stig — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 06:15:10 -0800

Mailbox providers, who derive virtually all their value from the breadth of their customer base, will never purposely degrade the treatment of non-certified messages.

They will if they begin making money not from the people receiving mail, as in the current scenario, but from the e-mailers. The flow of money defines who the customer is => people paying you are your customers. If the customer is the e-mailers then it will be in the ISP's interest to ratchet up the spam filters tighter and tighter and when a company complains tell them to pay to get through.

c) You keep using inflammatory terms: first a â€œtaxâ€, than â€œprotection racketâ€ and now â€œkickbacksâ€. Is â€œright wing conspiracyâ€ next? Canâ€™t we have a dialog free of that noise?

Goodmail pays ISPs some money it takes in per-email charges. How is this not a kickback? The post office doesn't give any of the extra money it charages for certified delivery to the receivers of certified mail.

This system encourages ISPs to block more mail and force e-mailers to go to Goodmail to get around it, which means more money for the ISP.

isn't there a simpler solution?

Anonymous — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 03:37:30 -0800

If one doesn't like AOL's policies, isn't the best solution
to simply boycott AOL, or at least move to someone else for
email delivery if you don't like the way they handle it?

As for paying for email, well, as long is the cost is NEGLIGIBLE
to legitimate users, and high enough for spammers, I don't really
see the problem. After all, I pay about EUR 70, total, for all
internet costs (6016 kb/s DSL connection, VOIP, hosting for a
few domains, SMTP server for outgoing mail, backup MX server
independent of my hardware, etc etc). (Since I run a lot of
hardware 24x7, the cost of power is actually more than the EUR
70 mentioned above for non-power costs).

What the actual breakdown of the costs is doesn't interest me.
I don't know how the service providers calculate, and I don't
have to know or care. As long as they make enough to stay in
business, and the cost is not too much for me, we are all happy.

So, it wouldn't matter to me if I were to pay, say, 5 EUR more
for email and 5 EUR less for the backup MX server or whatever.

I pay (as part of a package deal which includes much, much more)
for the use of an SMTP server which, of course, is NOT an open
relay. When I started out, I sent stuff directly from my own
SMTP server, but, since I (now) have a volatile IP address (with
modern DNS services such as the highly recommended
http://www.dynaccess.com/ the cost of fixed addresses is too much
to justify the small gain in functionality), I noticed some people
couldn't receive my email, since they only wanted email from
trusted SMTP relay servers.

I think that's OK. In an ideal world, yes, this wouldn't be
necessary, but probably the most effective way of stopping spam
from reaching your eyes (as opposed to stopping spammers, which
one should still do since it clogs the network, but this is more
difficult and beyond what an individual can do) is to only accept
stuff from SMTP relay servers which do not send spam.

If I want to send more than I do, for example, a newsletter to
thousands of people, then I can pay a bit more, register a sender
address and also send these through the same server.

In essence, I am paying the provider of the SMTP server to keep
his server spam-free. I think he does a good job at a fair price.

All email reaches my computers directly. For a small fee, the
same provider offers spam-filtering and virus-scanning. (I prefer
to do these myself. I run virus-immune systems and prefer to have
information on the spammers for when I have time to take legal action
against them.)

Brad, you seem to be mainly a free-market kind of guy, so why not
just encourage AOL customers to move to a mail system with someone
else more to your and their liking? After all, there is nothing
like a boycott to get someone to change their policies, especially
if they lose more money than they make through the new scheme.

I think most agree

brad — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 09:51:22 -0800

And the talk of network neutrality regulation that there is has mostly, but certainly not entirely, centered on the bodies that already regulate the monopoly providers (cable cos, ilecs) because they are monopolies or a duopoly, not because they are ISPs. Ie. the PUCs or FCC. However, there have been proposals in congress so there is reason to be wary.

2 more cents

oldhats — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 05:01:41 -0800

Two more cents...Congressional regulation of an industry that has thrived in its absence, is a mistake, imho. The problem net neutrality hopes to address is hypothetical at best, and the bottom line is that neither the market nor the FCC would allow a company to "squeeze its pipes." Telcos know that they must provide a quality product at a competitive price or the consumer will take their business elsewhere. I just don't see them abandoning the people who pay the rent. In addition, the FCC has the regulatory authority to stop a company from limiting, degrading or otherwise blocking services on its network. So why does Congress insist on imposing new regulations when none are needed?

My Two Cents

AJ Carey — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 16:51:59 -0800

I make no claim to being nearly informed enough about the history and origins of the internet to make any useful claims about contracts and the like. I do, however, know more than enough to know that the solution to any problem with the internet, real of imagined, is not through Congressional legislation. Congress and government in general remaining hands off must be acknowledged by all as having been key to the success of the internet. To bring them in now would likely have devastating effects.

What's the factual basis

brad — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 14:26:08 -0800

For your claim that Aunt Tilly is never going to find herself paying to send mail? That’s how E-mail systems used to work. That’s how many people, including Esther Dyson, say they want them to work. Search the web for a decade of proposals for e-stamps, email-taxes or related proposals. On what do you base your claim that there is no chance of this happening? Do you not agree the risk of it happening becomes much higher if Goodmail becomes established?

Realize that while I call goodmail’s price high, because it is vastly more than the real cost of sending an e-mail, it’s a price I can easily see the market accepting. I sent 5440 personal emails last year, or $14 if I didn’t pay a certification fee. (Though I sent many thousands more since I didn’t count ccs, or mailings to my personal mailing list) but it’s still going to be under $100. What the price stops is software that mails on behalf of others, and people who host mailing lists. And for many people the bureaucracy would be more than the money. Most such proposals also have no way to easily deal with anonymous mail. They have many problems — but some powerful people think they are a good idea. So there is something to fear.

Like I said I'm not doing this to support goodmail

Suresh Ramasubramanian — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 03:14:27 -0800

It is to oppose the way dearaol is running this entire campaign, with astroturfing and misquotes substituting for logic.

Oh - Esther's wrong, way wrong on this if she thinks this model is going to scale or extend enough that Aunt Tilly is going to find herself paying money to send email, but I do find the dearaol press release that says it exposes aol's secret and innermost longings.

Her article IS quite balanced for all of that. And the way dearaol put out a press release attacking it amuses me, a lot.

Three comments at once...

brad — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 20:29:07 -0800

But I will reply in one.

a) You act as though we don't know what Goodmail is doing and then complain about what they're not doing. This is pointlessly antagonistic. As I've said many times, this is about the concept, the precedents, of which Goodmail is the first successful salvo. No, goodmail is not a tax, no, it is not charging you to mail your girlfriend, but these things are often proposed as part of this school of anti-spam thought. We're opposing the school, not just goodmail, so that goodmail is not doing some of the the things is not germane to the debate about the _trend_ and whether it's good or bad. I hope nobody is so foolish as to think this trend stops with what Goodmail is doing today. Rather, if Goodmail succeeds it makes it easier for others to follow with more. The Korean example largely failed. Goodmail makes it easier for the next one to go further.

b) Yes, I believe that people on the list have been blocked by AOL in the past, I don't know the recent situations. I would have to check for specific cites. However, again, this is not about AOL or Goodmail in specific. This is about a principle. There are lots of hardworking, well intentioned people at AOL. Presumably at Goodmail too.

c) The whole point of the essay I wrote to start this is that spam is not, in spite of many people's instincts a cost issue. The whole point of the internet cost contract is you don't get to account for the cost of individual traffic. The subtle difference is that spam is more correctly a DoS issue. DoS is the one place you do get to account for the traffic. No one spam is a DoS, no one spam is an unfair "shift" of cost because the internet deal is there's no shifting of cost in either direction. The mass of spams that overload our systems and mailboxes -- that's the real issue of spam and the place to find the solution.

d) In spite of your admonition not to worry about this extending to Aunt Tilly, that's exactly what we see people like Esther Dyson suggesting is inevitable. If you want to cite her arguments so much, don't leave out the big part.

Spam and free speech

Suresh Ramasubramanian — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 17:58:14 -0800

Spam's never been a content issue. It is speech - but the sort of speech (or shall we say communication) where the recipient bears most of the costs, and the setup and incremental costs for the sender of spam are trivially low.

e-postage and micropayment schemes of one variety or the other are just not new, and Daum Korea (as big a name among email users in korea as AOL is stateside) has long been using what they call an "e-stamp" scheme, where bulk senders buy online stamps to send email to Daum users, and where Daum users can click on the stamp displayed in email from these bulk senders, to vote on whether or not they actually want / solicited the email .. with some provisions to provide free stamps to nonprofit senders, and to discount / make stamps free to a sender if lots of Daum users said they wanted their email. Sorta kinda like goodmail.

But Daum found it rather difficult to apply that system to senders from outside korea, and to even senders within Korea. AOL is not even trying to extend goodmail to try and charge Aunt Tilly ... they're targeting bulk senders of email as I said.

In other words, this or any other "pay to send email scheme" is NOT going to scale to charge all email. Ever. Read through John Levine's great paper on this - http://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf (and of course his "how bad is goodmail") http://weblog.johnlevine.com/2006/02/14#goodmail

I'll repeat that the goodmail issue - as has been a lot of the recent eff position papers etc on spam - is a tempest in a teapot. And an artificially created, and highly inaccurate tempest at that.

Server side spam filtering, user choice and awareness

Suresh Ramasubramanian — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 17:44:34 -0800

> Didnâ€™t condemn server side spam filtering as a concept. What
> they condemned was taking away user choice and awareness.

Call it one man, one vote, brad .. with a report as spam system replacing a ballot box (or even one of those diebold machines with their wonderfully chancy chads). So while you, or I would rather not see Bush in the white house, the man did get some votes, possibly even enough to put him there, given that he's there now.

User choice and awareness does come into play. As I said - most ISPs that filter spam do have an obligation to listen to their users, and to give a fair hearing to email / calls from people whose legitimate email they've blocked. Most ISPs do just that.. we certainly do.

A substantial part of our spam filtering (and AOL's, and yahoo's) is keyed to spam reports from our users.

But giving a fair hearing after blocking means that you do have a right to raise some issues which in your opinion led to the block. Could be a compromised script on a webserver, could be a mailing list that's generating complaints.

The feedback loops that AOL and we (and at least some other large ISPs) provide to bulk senders / ISPs is a way for them to stay on top of any complaints about email that they are sending, or their systems are originating, and to deal with them fast, before the volume of complaints gets high enough to trigger a block.

Just like elections, there's likely to be some dispute about filtering decisions as well, which is where actually listening to complaints about valid email getting blocked comes in. Have any of the people who have been fulminating about aol taxing email actually been blocked by AOL? And if so have they used the contact info - 1-800 number, email addresses etc - at http://postmaster.info.aol.com to contact the AOL postmasters? They are a wonderfully clued and responsive bunch of people, I must say, having met and interacted with most of them over the last several years

Cindy seems to disagree...

Suresh Ramasubramanian — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 17:35:38 -0800

Ref the latest dearaol.com release criticizing Esther Dyson's NYT article, and Esther's / Cindy's followup posts on the IP list.

It is fun to see that "your girlfriend is going to get charged for sending you email" meme trotted out time and again. Once, possibly.

Somehow, it seems to get a lot less funnier as that tired old meme (or should I say red herring) is dragged on and on.

Goodmail (or, as the simplistic rabble rousing goes, "email tax" or "pay to send email") seems to be targeting senders of bulk email as far as I can see. [and yes I am sure someone from dearaol will trot out the Pastor Martin Neimoller quote, or maybe drag out that other old favorite, the slippery slope argument]

And the dearaol coalition is somewhat concerned that CDT, and Esther Dyson are taking a more balanced view of the situation. The horror, the horror!

Esther felt she was misquoted by dearaol.com's press release on the subject - I dont exactly blame her. This campaign has degenerated into pure astroturfing of the sort that routinely gets decried when the neocons engage in it.

-srs

The principles EFF issued many years ago

brad — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 10:29:31 -0800

Didn’t condemn server side spam filtering as a concept. What they condemned was taking away user choice and awareness. And no, “we told you about it in the fine print of the TOS” doesn’t count much more than it does for spyware installs. If mail is to be blocked, it should be a user’s choice. And when mail is to be blocked, somebody that cares (the recipient or sender) must be aware of it. Admins are often tempted to deviate from these principles, because they are harder to follow than the simple path, and it’s certainly hard to be motivated when all you want is to be rid of the spam.

But the principles have values beyond spam. In the free speech world, history teaches you err on the side of protecting speech by a wide, wide margin. Because if you sit near the line — whatever your line is — you can be sure other forces will start pushing you over it.

As for “spam is not free speech” this is where we get some of the conflict. Spam, like kiddie porn, guys in megaphone trucks, Nazi parades, embarassing government secrets and Mapplethorpe photos is speech. As speech, it gets the presumption of being free, with a very hard standard required before trying to remove those freedoms. In particular because such removals are never surgical, and in a free society, you accept you’re going to take some bad in order to be sure you don’t stomp on any good. When the EFF has stood up to defend much nastier speech than spam, it hasn’t been for a love of that speech, though of course opponents will always portray it that way.

Some in the anti-spam community of course, are with us on this, and agree that spam should be treated as a bulk mail abuse problem, and the contents and purpose of the text should be orthogonal to how to stop it. Others say, “let’s ban E-mails that say one thing but not ban email sthat say another.” Some even want to ban UCE rather than UBE. What’s odd, by the way, is that even if you took the intersection of what everybody agrees should be stopped, rather than the union of all annoying mails, you would still have put your finger on 99% of spam. But it makes people so emotional they forget that.

However, this thread’s on charging for e-mail, and spam is only the trigger that got people into doing that. I still maintain that charging for e-mail is a giant step backwards, and that it will kill a lot of innovation as it becomes more common.

It hasn’t been the driver of my arguments, but I’m working on a software app, for example, that like many web applications, has a form in it which will send email on your behalf. Like most such apps, it asks you for your email address so it can send it in your name. There are a million web sites that do things like this. Most of the sender verification systems proposed would break such a tool, for example. And a trend towards pay-to-send will also break such tools if they want to be free, as most are.

That is of course because I believe the chances of this trend stopping here are extremely low, close to nada, unless we put up the big fight we’re putting up.

Brad, you keep ignoring the facts

Daniel Dreymann — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 07:01:20 -0800

a) You keep ignoring the problem: spam and phishing filters are NOT going away nor are they EVER going to be perfect. Consumers demand a cleaner and safer mailbox. Cry as you want, email providers will make their best to filter out junk and in the process there will be casualties. As Suresh said: Staying firmly in the past just to keep the memory of those days alive?

b) You keep ignoring the economics: Mailbox providers, who derive virtually all their value from the breadth of their customer base, will never purposely degrade the treatment of non-certified messages. If they did so, whatever revenue from CertifiedEmail they might make will be dwarfed by losses stemming from churn with dissatisfied customers leaving their service.

d) You keep ignoring how the system works: no â€œartificial costsâ€ here. It took millions of dollars to build our systems and it will take millions to operate it (for us and for the mailbox providers). Take a moment to understand how it works (come visit us in Mountain View). No mailbox provider we talked to was comfortable providing the same premium service based on a simplistic certificate system. This is the real world â€“ not an imaginary place in which simple solutions are good enough.

Oh I understand his motivation

Suresh Ramasubramanian — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 03:51:40 -0800

But being stuck in the past isnt doing him, or anybody else, any good.

And the basic motivation behind allowing open relay - as a courtesy to other users and operators on a trusted network, to provide extra paths in a time of highly limited connectivity, is long gone.

Staying firmly in the past just to keep the memory of those days alive?

I walk a tightrope all the time between blocking spam and delivering valid email. I need to do both. So yes valid email will get blocked from time to time - my team's job is to make my filters as fine grained as is possible (read: feasible and scalable) for me to implement without letting in far more spam than valid email. And to keep an eye out for false postivies, and for reports of false positives from our users, or from people who want to email our users, and get those false positives fixed, or worked around.

I'm actually pretty representative of the typical email postmaster at a large ISP .. I've met most of them, and they hold fairly similar views. You wont find those anathema to the EFF's mission, given that you dont like spam any more than we do, nor would you call spam free speech.

Never mind this discussion about goodmail .. several previous interactions I've had with the EFF leave me with the impression that your policy is that any server side, ISP operated spam filtering at all is bad, and is anathema with your position.

And all the examples that I've had thrown in my face to prove that position has been "bad" spam filtering - poor filtering decisions that are condemned by sensible email administrators as well.

That's about as good a way to argue as to point to a few corrupt cops, say, and then argue that the police shouldnt exist at all, and are anathema to the concept of justice.

-srs

ps: Thanks for giving me an idea. I'm probably going to do a BoF or panel somewhere this year, most likely at a maawg meeting - http://www.maawg.org .. A "top 10 no-nos for a postmaster / abuse desk operator .. and those top 10 no nos would all be quite similar to the examples of bad spam filtering I've seen from the EFF <- save of course the reasoning that all blocking of poorly managed political lists is a right wing plot .. our filters, based on user complaints and a few other things, are not too particular about the political color of a badly managed list.

The true invention of the internet, redux, and Goodmail/Network Neutrality

brad — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 16:34:11 -0800

I wrote an essay here a year ago on the internet cost contract and how it was the real invention (not packet switching) that made the internet. The internet cost contract is “I pay for my end, you pay for yours, and we don’t sweat the packets.” It is this approach, not any particular technology, that fostered the great things that came from the internet. (Though always-on also played a big role.)

It’s time to re-read that essay because two recent big issues uncover attacks on the contract, and thus no less than the foundation of the internet.

The first is the Goodmail program announced by AOL. The EFF has been a leading member of a coalition pushing AOL to reconsider this program. People have asked us, “how bad can it really be?” Why is putting a price on E-mail so bad?

One particular disturbing thing about the goodmail program is that it reminds me a bit of a protection racket. Goodmail hopes its customers will pay it hundreds of millions of dollars because they are afraid of spam filters. They are selling those customers (who are required to be legitimate mailers sending solicited mail) protection from the spam filters of AOL. Problem is, those spam filters shouldn’t be blocking the legitimate mail at all — it is a flaw in the filters that makes people want to buy protection from them. They’re buying protection from something that shouldn’t be harming them in the first place. An ISP, like AOL, would normally be expected to have the duty to deliver legitimate mail to its customers. To serve those customers, they also block spam. Now, unlike the mobster selling protection, AOL’s spam-blockers are not blocking the legitimate mail maliciously, but that’s about the only difference, and part of why this smells bad.

This has been my direct criticism of the program on its own. Goodmail says it’s really a certification program. There have been IETF standards to sign E-mail and get certificates for signers for a long time, and many “Certificate Authority” companies of all stripes who sell such a process. They don’t charge per message, though.

The charging per message sets a nasty precedent which is an attack on the internet cost contract. It violates the rule about not sweating the individual traffic. I pay for my end, you pay for yours. As soon as we start deciding some traffic is good and bad, and some traffic has to pay to transit the pipes or get through the filters, we’ve taken a step backwards to the settlement based networks that the internet defeated decades ago.

In the 70s and 80s the world had many online services you paid for by the hour. It had MCI mail, which you paid to send. It had packet switched X.25 networks you paid for by the kilopacket. They were all crushed by the internet, not just in cost, buy in innovation. AOL, the last of the online services, had to adopt the internet model in almost all respects to avoid a slope to doom.

The idea of a two-tier internet, which many have been writing about recently, has generated the debate on a subject called network neutrality. Sometimes the problem is attempts to block services entirely based on what they are (such as blocking VoIP that competes with the phone service of the company that owns the wires.) Other times it’s a threat that companies providing high-bandwidth services, like video and voice, should “pay their share” and not get a “free ride” on the pipes that “belong” to the telco or cable ISPs.

Once again, the goal is to violate the contract. The pipes start off belonging to the ISPs but they sell them to their customers. The customers are buying their line to the middle, where they meet the line from the other user or site they want to talk to. The problem is generated because the carriers all price the lines at lower than they might have to charge if they were all fully saturated, since most users only make limited, partial use of the lines. When new apps increase the amount a typical user needs, it alters the economics of the ISP. They could deal with that by raising prices and really delivering the service they only pretend to sell, or by charging the other end, and breaking the cost contract. They’ve rattled sabres about doing the latter.

The contract is worth defending not just because it gives us cheap internet or flat rates. It is worth defending because it fosters innovation. It lets people experiment with services that would get shut down quickly if people got billed per packet. Without the cost contract, great new ideas will never get off the ground. And that would be the real shame.