Spam control again

[josephc at etards.net (josephc at etards.net)]

On 16 Jul 2003, Seth Gordon wrote:

> (2) If a commercial email message passes through an American ISP, that
> ISP must warrant that the sender is complying with point (1).  If the
> sender cannot be located, or if the sender loses a lawsuit to recover
> damages but does not pay, then the ISP is liable.
>

Impossible. Unless you're going to have someone reading each e-mail that 
passes through their network, then there is no way to differentiate 
between commercial e-mail and non-commercial e-mail (you could pass 
ANOTHER law requiring commercial contain a flag in the header, but again, 
you can't force American laws on other countries).
 
> (3) Notwithstanding (2), if a commercial email message passes from one
> American ISP to another American ISP to its recipient, the downstream
> ISP may pass responsibility to the upstream one, and would only be
> responsible for the damages if the upstream ISP is insolvent.
> 

Recent decisions in P2P have decided that ISP bear no responsibility for 
traffic that passes over their network.

> (4) If a commercial email message passes from a non-American ISP to an
> American ISP to its recipient, the American ISP is responsible.
> 

Both of my previous points apply to this.

> Now, if this law were passed, then every American ISP that has
> interconnect agreements with foreign ISPs would tell their partners:
> "Post a bond so we're insured against spam-related damages coming from
> your network, or we're going to block all incoming port 25 traffic from
> you."

NO foreign company would agree to this. No foreign company could afford to 
agree with this. It would cost a single ISP tens of millions of dollars in 
'bonds' in order to allow their customers to send e-mail to the US.

Of course this would only be an issue until a company that could afford to 
post those types agreements with American ISP's (AOL or MS).

Please don't tell me this is the actual law that's been proposed to 
congress.

-joe