[ih] Every spam is sacred, was Endliss misconceptions

[John Levine]

It appears that Jack Haverty via Internet-history <jack at 3kitty.org> said:
>Why has the Internet (including Email and the Web), which I at least 
>think is now a similar crucial world infrastructure, not developed any 
>similar governance machinery?

Let's look at the way paper mail works.

Every country has a post office, sometimes a government agency, these
days more often a public corporation like the USPS in the US and Royal
Mail in the UK. In some cases its duties are split up, as in the UK
where Royal Mail delivers the mail and the Post Office runs the post
offices. In Germany the former government post office is now called
DHL and the regulator has licensed competitors although DHL handles
most German mail.

Within each country mail services are heavily regulated, and the only
way to send a letter is to buy a stamp and then present the letter to
the local postal service somehow. International mail is managed by a
web of treaties coordinated by the Universal Postal Union, an
organization located in Berne, Switzerland. See upu.int.

The postal revenue on international mail has settlements, splitting
the revenue by complex forumlae determined partly by cost and partly
by politics, notably that developing countries pay very low
settlements. For historical reasons China is still considered a
developing country which is why Chinese sellers on Amazon and eBay can
sell you stuff and ship it from Shenzen for less than what the postage
would be for a U.S. vendor.

Government oversight is no guarantee that a postal service is well
run. The current Postmaster General in the U.S. believes that his job
is to keep the USPS from losing money, rather than to deliver the
mail. So he has made deals with Amazon where they pay the USPS to
deliver their packages, which is fine, but also told rural post
offices to prioritize those deliveries over real mail, without adding
extra staff, so the real mail doesn't get delivered. See:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/amazon-packages-reportedly-overwhelm-small-post-offices-delaying-other-mail/

In the UK, there has been a 25 year scandal in which the Post Office
had a botched accounting system called Horizon which showed phantom
shortages in the accounts of hundeds of sub-postmaters (local stores
contracting with the P.O.) leading to prosecutions, jail time, and
suicides for crimes that never happened.  Just in the past week a
TV show about the Horizon scandal sufficiently embarassed the UK
government that they're finally making noises about reversing the
convictions, but the cost of reimbursing the victims is so high that
the Post Office is close to bankruptcy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036

If I squint really hard, I suppose I can kind of imagine an e-mail
system that worked this way, although the white paper I wrote 20 years
ago explaning why e-postage is a bad idea is still completely relevant.
See https://taugh.com/epostage.pdf

Moreover, postal mail systems invariably require that all legal mail
is delivered, with legal generally meaning not physically dangerous and
not in a short set of prohibited categories like CSAM and terrorist
promotion.

Depending on who's counting, somwhere between 90% and 95% of the mail
sent on the Internet today is spam. A lot of that spam is illegal,
e.g., trying to phish your bank account, but a lot more is entirely
legal, just annoying and unwanted. 

Be careful what you ask for.

R's,
John