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	Rex Ballard - Director of Electronic Distribution
	http://cnj.digex.net/~rballard

On Tue, 5 Nov 1996, 'Doc' Don Taylor wrote:

> > > For today's reading leisure in Doctor Don's Waiting Room < <
>     ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
> 
>         "The Court declares that Cyber Promotions does not have
> a right under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
> or under the constitutions of Pennsylvania and Virginia to send
> unsolicited email advertisements over the Internet to members of
> America Online." So ruled Judge Charles R. Weiner, of the U.S. Court
> for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

This is not exactly a precedent.  E-mail spamming has been an issue for a
long time.  There is a tradition of tactics for dealing with unsolicited
advertizements.  This court action simply formalizes the procedures.

First.  E-Mail is sent at no cost the the sender and the majority of the
cost is that of the recipient's host.  It is the recipient host that
provides the storage, full-time telecommunications access, and forwarding
or viewing capabilities.

Internet information distribution has always been on an "As requested"
basis, primarily because of the logistics of the various distribution
schemes.  For example:

A simple mailing list to a host such as AOL, which may have 1000
subscribing members and receives 50 messages/day with each message
averaging 20,000 bytes will require over 100 megabytes/day to store
relatively redundant e-mail.  Now, imagine the impact of the spam artist
who sends a 5000 byte text and a 200kbyte graphic to each of AOL's 3
million subsribers. We can fill up a gigabyte every two days.  If users
connect an average of once every 3 days, we have a little problem.  Beyond
the simple storage problem, we also have 3 million users trying to access
their personal copy of something they didn't want to recieve anyway.

The traditional response of the irritated user is to send a "brick".
Typically a substantial reply containing a large attachment such as an X
rated GIF file.  This is generally enough to discourage the spam senders
host administrator from allowing spam to be sent from his host.  Most
ISPs explicitly forbid sending spam.

To meet the needs of users who wanted to get messages and only needed one
copy, the usenet news and network news transport protocol were developed.
This allowed a single message to be sent to a place where all members of
the group could read it.  These newsgroup postings were organized by
subject and a mechanism for initiating new groups and announcing these new
groups was created.  Users who want to read these news groups can access
the group on their own host, or on the remote host that is supporting the
ISP's news feed.

As the number of newsgroups increased (there are now over 16,000 groups),
the problem of where to get information and how to get to targeted content
became an issue.  Brewster McKale and several others at Thinking Machines
came up with a search engine and protocol that could simultaniously search
other machines.  The original intent was to sell the massively parallel
servers created by Thinking Machines.  The idea caught on and suddenly
people were putting up their own WAIS servers.  It became possible to
simultaneously search hundreds of hosts and come up with a unified result
in a matter of a few seconds.

The other breakthrough was a "read-only telnet with hypertext" client
called Linx which could use hypertext transfer protocol (http) and enabled
a host to grant read-only access to the general public in a safe and
secure manner.  This later became known as a browser, and the network of
WAIS engines and http servers became known as "The Web".

>     So AOL, according to this ruling, does have a right to
> block e-mail from Cyber Promo and other junk emailing sites.

Every system administrator has the right to protect the privacy of their
users.  The simplest method is to route all of the remote traffic back to
the sender, throw it into the bit bucket, or save summaries for further
legal and economic sanctions.  No Internet site administrator is under any
obligation to accept all IP packets.  Technologies such as fire-walls,
packet filter routers, and protected hosts are standard operating
prodecure for any site which provides access to the internet.

>      "It sets a clear precedent that marketers do not have an
> unequivocal right to mass-solicit members on the Internet," according
> to AOL's legal spokesman.

They have the right to send anything they want, but no router in the
network is obligated to carry their traffic.  Many ISPs block traffic to
and from MSN and other hosts (primarily to block robots and index
engines).

>     Sanford Wallace, president of Cyber Promotions, said that the
> ruling  "does not mean that Cyber Promotions is prohibited from
> sending commercial email.

He's completely correct.  In fact, there are many ISPs who now offer
extra-cheap internet access, and aggressively seek out spam senders.
In fact, they only accept spam from those who pay "access fees".  These
"Junk mail sites" aren't particularly popular (do you want to check for
that important deal and discover that it has been lost in a heap of 600
items of junk-mail.

The best approach to "Junk Mail" is to provide a search engine that
accesses other search engines, but also searches your junk-mail and ranks
it high on the relevance ranking.

> It simply means AOL can continue blocking
> unsolicited email." Hmm, the judge did say he didn't have a right
> to send it, didn't he?

Actually, he has the right to send it, but it could be blocked by the
sender's ISP (this occaisionally happens when an ISP discovers that a user
is using a directly connected SLIP or PPP host to dump spam.  If the spam
engine is saturating a 128kb ISDN link and the ISP only has a CIR of 64kb,
there is a risk that his machine will crash.  The simple solution is to
route the trash into the bit bucket.

>     "The bottom line is it will be a very sad day when a few powerful
> media companies like AOL can control Internet traffic in a way that
> benefits their own financial interests," Wallace added.

Competition is a wonderful thing.  Because the core technology (TCP/IP,
HTTP, HTML, and MIME) are all public domain and reference implementation
source code is available under General Public License, AOL has little to
gain through censorship.   Many AOL customers switch to local ISPs because
they can get better service, more newsgroups, and better response from the
local provider. Companies like Digex are franchising content while
maintaing the "Local Provider" convenience and performance.

>     The EFF said they thought this was the right ruling but
> for the wrong reason, and an appeals court would probably
> uphold the ruling but change the reasoning. Sanford said he
> is deciding whether to appeal.

The ruling is consistent with standard practices.  I get concerned when
legislators and judges start trying to be system adminestrators.  When
they are ready to get up at 3:00 A.M. at the chiming of a pager because
some spam artist just blew away the /var/spool/mail partition, they have
the right to pass judgements.

>     http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,5059,00.html
> Doc

	Rex Ballard - Advisor on Internet Commercialization for 6 years.
			over 6,000 publishers served.


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From market-l@mailer.fsu.edu Wed Nov  6 00:13:01 1996
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