FC: John Gilmore on Earthlink, anti-spam rules, and censorship

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Previous Politech message:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-03961.html

Also, here's an excellent essay on spam that John wrote back in February (I 
even quoted from it in my weekly column that will appear on News.com in a 
few hours):
http://www.politechbot.com/p-03204.html

-Declan

---

Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2002 10:39:19 -0700
From: John Gilmore <gnu () toad com>
To: annalee () techsploitation com, politech () politechbot com, gnu () toad com
Subject: Re: Earthlink's anti-spam censorship

Earthlink has been blocking all mail from "toad.com" for years --
despite toad not even being on the Internet any more.  (I now get my
email via uucp, because an anti-spam zealot at Verio canceled my T1.)

Earthlink has a little "enemies list".  Whether you are on the list is
unrelated to whether you send spam.  I've never sent spam in my life,
but there I was on the list.  I had about a dozen friends using
Earthlink, who left and got accounts elsewhere so I could communicate
with them.  Each of them tried having a discussion with Earthlink's
"customer service" about why Earthlink was preventing them from
receiving email from their friend (me).  But they got "serviced" by
Earthlink the way barnyard animals get serviced, so they left.

A simple rule for anti-spam measures that preserves non-spammers'
freedom to communicate is: No anti-spam measure should ever block a
non-spam message.  But there isn't a single anti-spam organization
that actually follows this rule.  Instead they block non-spam messages
(such as every message from an "open relay"), as a coercion tactic, to
"encourage" those sites to change their policies.  I refuse to be
coerced, and you should refuse too.

The policies of some of these organizations have gotten increasingly
bizzare.  My DNS registrar was blacklisted because they let anyone
register a domain.  Yes, it's true.  Anyone who pays them the small
fee can register a domain, and it stays registered until they stop
paying.  It's a radical idea; you pay your money and you get the
service you're paying for.  That idea was too good for the
anti-spammers.  Instead, they wanted the registrar to somehow ensure
that no spam message ever referenced any domain registered by that
registrar -- or immediately cancel the domain if a spam message ever
did.  "Do that or we'll blacklist you."  Raving idiocy.

Don't believe reports, such as the one Declan reposted from Suresh
Ramasubramanian, that "most ISPs around the world block [mail from]
open relays".  When toad.com was on the net, mail from it would get
through to almost everywhere, despite being blacklisted by most of the
zealot blacklists.  The blacklists are not very pervasive, because
they block so much legitimate mail that customers won't put up with
them.

EFF ran "SpamAssassin" on its internal mail for a while; but it marked
an entire issue of our Effector newsletter as "spam", due to bogus
rules like "Too many capital letters" and "Discussions of how to
unsubscribe".  It also marked or deleted important messages sent by
individuals to our lawyers.  Most EFF staff got rid of it.

Skipping spam is quick.  Figuring out that someone's communication to
you is being censored, and recovering from that, is hard.  Particuarly
when it's being done automatically by some middleman who doesn't
actually care whether you can communicate -- like Earthlink.  Luckily,
most telephones aren't carried through the censored Internet, so at
least when you don't reply to someone's email, they can phone you to
ask you what's up.  Email queries about why you aren't answering just
get thrown away by sites like Earthlink, for the same reason they
threw away the original message.

Anti-spam is to Internet freedom as anti-terrorism is to Constitutional rights.
The most ridiculous justifications are routinely accepted and believed.
The lemmings all cheer when somebody restricts our freedom to communicate
"because of spam".  Thanks, Annalee, for exposing Earthlink's fraud.

        John Gilmore




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