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Spamhaus: MCI Makes $5M A Year In Spam Profits
An anonymous reader submits "According to a new Spamhaus report, MCI makes $5 million a year hosting spammers and illegal spamware. MCI/UUNET has long topped the Spamhaus spam supporting ISPs list, with nearly 200 active SBL entries. MCI even took on spammers such as iMedia, when they were terminated by Savvis in their half-hearted response to leaked pro-spam memos."
You do realize that UUNET(/MCI/WorldCom) supports roughly one third of all the traffic on the internet, don't you. You can't simply block one third of all your legitimate incoming mail.
Furthermore, I don't want to make ISP's responsible for the content that they are hosting. I think that would set very bad precedent, and the internet as a whole will be much better off if if ISPs are legal regarded as common carriers.
Fight the spammers not the postal service.
Then they should have no quals about cutting off the spammers.
The point is, they're still making $5M so why bother cutting off the spammers unless it is advantageous for them to do so. I.E. if they make $5M by keeping the spammers, I'm sure they'd drop them if they could make $10M in that action. It's kind of like if you make $80,000/year and every year an extra $5 appears in your account. Even if somebody told you "hey if you stop serving such and such, those $5 will disappear." Why would you bother? In fact, if somebody said "if you stop serving those people, that $5 will turn into $10" you still probably wouldn't care:P In order for MCI to have a legitimate reason to cancel those accounts, they'd have to make hundreds of millions from that decision and/or be in legal trouble. Otherwise, it's a non-issue.
The credo list you have (1. to the customer 2. to the employees 3. to the community 4. to the shareholders) was a short term abberation that virtually no company in the world today would agree with.
:) It has been long known that many companies calculate just how bad they can perform customer service without running off most of the thier customers. Why do you think companies want you to input your account numbers when you call customer service? So they can identify really good customers from the rest of and drop you into a long wait queue in India. Really good customers (read high dollar value customers) get put at the head of the line and get routed to customer service centers here in the US.
All companies today use the following order 1. shareholders 2. shareholders 3. shareholders 4. company executives.
Companies today have a vision that is about 3 months out to the next quarterly report. The reason is that shareholders will trash a companies stock if they don't exceed all expectation each quarter. And companies have no loyalty or responsibility toward employees. Employees are the first ones cast adrift so a company can show a short term improvement on their bottom line. As to customers, I have to think that most companies feel their customers are morons and idiots. Just look at the commercials they run.
J&J was in a shear panic over that incident. And they did what they did because they felt the company was dead if they did not. Bottom line. Nothing more nothing less.