[Mimedefang] OS wars... [was Viruses: Bounce or Discard?]

[Joe Stevens]

> My insurance company doesn't charge extra if I have a dog.  They give me a
> "no dog" discount if I don't have one.  That kind of game can work here
> too.

That idea is based on the fact that your insurance company is less 
likely to pay a claim if you don't have a dog.

> 
> An ISP can sell this by offering two rates:  The "normal" rate and a "safe
> user discount".  Make the "normal" notibly higher than the safe user
> rate, but the safe user discount has this .10USD/spew policy.
> 

There are two problems with this:

1.  The amount of SPAM from out OWN users is minimal.  We would benifit 
if every other ISP in the world adopted this system, but not if we did 
it by ourselves. (in contrast to the insurance company, who is worried 
about paying a claim based on something your dog did)
2.  Because there is no cost savings on implimenting it, we will NEVER 
give users a discount based off it -- it would be just giving away 
profit. (I am sorry - few businesses are that good hearted)

So it just becomes the basic collective action problem.  We will *never* 
be able to get that much coordinated effort out of the world's ISPs (or 
even one country), without some clear and individual cost saving that 
will result from it.

...Just look at how hard people work at trying to get rouge ISPs to 
public properly aggregated BGP tables -- and there is *no* inherent 
hosts to fix that, you just have to correct you config file.

--
Joe