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

[Joe Stevens]

> That's not the point.  If my Linux box starts propagating viruses and costing
> other people money, then my ISP has the right to bill me.

Speaking as an ISP employee, that is really not fesible.

Yea, we can crossrefrence the IP and time a message was send with the 
authentication logs, and find out who sent it -- thats easy...  but BILL 
them?  Where do we get the "right" from?  What do we do with the money 
we collect?  Not to mention the popular outrage if we started it 
ourselves without some mandate from the government/every-other-isp.

You could also make the argument our users are paying for unrestricted 
access to the internet -- to do whatever they want with... and I think 
there is still debate over whether the unintentional propogation of a 
computer virus is even illegal; so its almost certainly not going to be 
"finable" by a non-government party.

Finally, there are so many rouge ISPs out there (mostly outside the US, 
but...) that we can't even get to stop a user (for example) flooding our 
network with UDP packets... that it just seems to make ISP fining on a 
global scale impracticle.

Your logic about users needing to pay the true economic cost of their 
software is sound... but ISPs aren't going to be the ones to charge them.

It it were me, I think it would be much more reasonable to have the 
government fine the software producers that *make* the buggy software. 
Not only would that give them incentive to make it better, it would also 
still cause the economic incidence to fall back to consumers 
(eventually) in terms of higher software licensing costs (because the 
software maker has to offset the *large* fine -- it couldn't be 
something they could just shrug off).  How many people would run windows 
if it cost $1000 per copy?  probably not many. (although whether the 
true cost to society is that high is also debateable...)


--
Joe