[WSIS CS-Plenary] Spam as an issue

[avri at acm.org]

Hi,

I would like to explore the issue of Spam as an IG issue.

My instinct all along is that this isn't an issue that belongs to 
Internet governance, but since many, if not most, other people on the 
WGIG and the CS think it is, I want to explore my reasoning and find 
out where I am missing the point.

When I look at Spam, and I do get a lot of it, I see two problems a 
technical problem and a legal problem.

In terms of the technology, if I have the correct protection software 
and my filters are well written I don't ever see 90% of it unless I 
want to; it goes into a folder I glance through periodically to make 
sure the nets haven't caught something I actually want.  In this 
regard, as a user I don't need to differentiate between legitimate fund 
raisers, legitimate bulk business mail, pornography or whatever.  It is 
all junk I do not want and it is easy to take care of.

In terms of other technical issues, there is a growing natural barrier 
to Spam.  As service providers block prefixes that generate a lot of 
spam, allowing spam to leave a network becomes a technical problem for 
the service provider, how to provide egress filtering.  Again this can 
be solved by technical methods and the prefix blocking provides a 
natural incentive for those who allow spam to stop it locally.

Finally there are the bandwidth and intermediate storage burdens.  I 
tend to see these as market forces that determine the requirements 
either for ways to filter or ways to charge for legitimate bulk mail 
and to make settlements based on those charges.
And while the issue of settlements is something I think is an IG issue, 
I don't see how Spam can be differentiated from other bandwidth issues 
in this respect.

I mentioned that I see some of the Spam issue as a legal problem.  
There are things that are considered illegal by different 
jurisdictions; in some places pornography, in some places phishing, in 
some cases hate speech, and in some places political dissent (not sure 
I can always tell the difference between the last two).  In most cases 
these are matters for local jurisdiction and fodder for the push and 
pull of legality, morality and freedom of expression.  One issue here 
is that I don't see anything that is tractable for Internet Governance 
here; do we want IG making proclamations about what is legal expression 
or not?  Personally, I don't. The main issue I see is that these issues 
are not qualitatively different on the Internet then they are in any 
Media or in any other public means of communication.

So, as I said I do not understand how Spam is either open to IG or is 
an appropriate goal of IG.  But since I know many, if not most other 
people, think it is, I pose the question: why?

thanks
a.