Comment by assimpleaspossi
2 hours ago
>>parasites that will pump resources and diminish the value of the system.
Countries' legal systems really need to do something about them.
2 hours ago
>>parasites that will pump resources and diminish the value of the system.
Countries' legal systems really need to do something about them.
I don’t think they can. Spam, like speeding on highways and drug sales, is such an asymmetric enforcement area that I have very limited confidence that legal enforcement would make a significant dent in the volume. It’s far too technically easy to anonymously, repeatedly break anti-spam laws. This is an area where consortium enforcement (like the big inbox providers pushing solutions like DKIM2) is probably the most effective.
Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of areas where countries’ legal systems have no excuse for not enforcing the law more stringently (e.g. flagrant corruption in multiple regulatory bodies’ failure to enforce investment/wire fraud). But spam is part of the other category—technically difficult enough to crack down on that legal action is a waste of time. There are ways to change that, but they’re all either more centralization-prone, worse for privacy/liberty, or extremely expensive.
They keep finding that huge spam campaigns were run by one guy from his bedroom. I can't remember which specific spam campaign was recently caught, it might've been the phone spam about car insurance. It was one guy with a huge botnet.
In total they are a finite set, and even catching 5% of them will scare the rest.