Ronald F. Guilmette wrote the following on 25/06/2013 11:04:
My apologies to everyone. I had intended to respond to the last few messages in this thread several days ago, but I've been preoccupied with other matters until now.
I want to respond only very briefly to one thing that Brian said, and then I want to put forward three very simple proposals. I know that I have already been far too verbose, so I shall try now to be brief.
And I, in turn, am just going to respond to one comment below which I think stems from a misunderstanding of something I may have badly phrased. The three proposals I will, of course, comment on, but I just want to clear up the misunderstanding first.
In message <51C437AF.1080300@heanet.ie>, Brian Nisbet <brian.nisbet@heanet.ie> wrote:
Of course in amongst all of this I would suspect if the resources were handed out, there would be a lot of depeering and null routing going on in relation to the poor, forced-to-spam, citizens of the Grand Duchy. :)
Once again, based upon the available evidence, I would claim that it would in fact be improbable that any substantial amount of deppeering and/or null routing would occur, in practice. It is a classic "trajedy of the commons" problem, and no operator would wish to have to explain to its user base why they, end end lusers, can no longer send e-mail to their cousins in Grand Fenwick.
I'm not sure, Spamhaus were quite happy to block Latvia for a far smaller reason. I think if it was a mandated activity for all citizens the reaction of the international community might be interesting.
For once I am at a loss for words.
Let me just say that I really feel that it would be... and perhaps even is currently... utterly wrong for the Internet and all actual and at least somewhat transparent and/or democratic authorities thereof, to completely defer, for the ongoing maintenance of order and sanity on the Internet, to Spamhaus. To say that that organization is imperfect would be an understatement. They miss much. And more to the point, Spamhaus is, in my estimation anyway, about as non-transparent in their policies, their operations, and their records as it is possible to be. Furthermore, deferring to them entirely for the enforcement of accepted norms is, and would be, in my opinion, just another kind of abdication. I believe that we can do better.
I was not suggesting that Spamhaus were necessarily the appropriate people to do this. As I mentioned in another mail this was an overly glib comment meant to suggest that people had reacted in the past. My point was rather that I'd be interested to see what the international reaction to such a situation would be, not that I think the international reaction would be to hand over full "policing" powers to Spamhaus. I am *very* much a fan of transparency, the more of it the better. Brian