[discuss] [governance] Re: Comcast undertakes 9 year IETF cosponsorship!?

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 24 Mar 2014, at 9:21 am, Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net> wrote:

> Because you are good enough to say that I know spam well .. I am sorry, how or why is the true origin of spam or any sort of email complex to identify?   At least from the perspective of a receiving mail system, there is the originating IP address, there are various authentication mechanisms (such as DMARC) which allow receiving systems to identify and flag / reject forged mail etc etc.

What Jefsey's point may have been (not trying to put words into his mouth, but this is my interpretation) is that one of the characteristic faults of the technical community is that it is prone to uncritically laud the Internet's architecture as being wholly beneficial, neutral in terms of welfare distribution, and fully supportive of democratic ideals (or worse, a substitute for democratic ideals).  In reality the effects of those architectural choices are very much more of a mixed bag, with some gains and some losses, unequally distributed, and with limited accountability to those affected by them.  So the simple example (perhaps) being given is that is that spam is a problem that was enabled by the architectural choices made by the Internet technical community, the very same choices that also provide us with many positive benefits such as resilience against censorship (but also other negatives such as vulnerability to surveillance).

--
Jeremy Malcolm PhD LLB (Hons) B Com
Internet lawyer, ICT policy advocate, geek
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