Unfortunately this discussion's overly simplistic. What kind of opt-out legislation is the US considering? There's 2 main kinds I can think of. The first is to opt out with each provider. That approach seems disastrous -- spammers just change their name or address, and what a miracle, they can spam you again. The second type is to opt out through a national registry, similar to the "do-not-call" registry that's been/being implemented in several states (including Massachusetts). If enough e-mail users opt out of spam (and why wouldn't they?) it could cripple the commercial viability of spam (at least in the US).
A final point: maybe the European approach is more effective, maybe not, but I don't see why legislative uniformity is necessary.... As long as all countries are effective in decreasing the incentive/legality for spammers to exist, does it matter? Silly example -- let's say large country A fined each piece of spam at $1 million, and large country B implemented the death penalty for spamming -- I think spam would decrease a lot pretty quickly. Anyway, if several competing approaches are tried on a large scale, and one is far and away a success, others will follow suit. Please don't posit US government conspiracies to protect spammers -- all the Nasdaq-100 companies hate spam (e.g., Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple). So do 99.9% of their online constituents. Those are the parties US legislators will (at least try to) protect.
Actually the NYT has already begun using google's NOARCHIVE option to prevent content caching. Here's an excerpt from the this morning's front page story's source:
Haven't there already been other projects with similar design goals, like the Self-certifying file system? The authors of SHFS say it's a hack, which has a few drawbacks -- e.g., in generic write operations on non-Linux machines, a separate write() system call is used for each byte! Can anyone comment on the relative merits/demerits of the alternatives?
Slashdot Mirror
A final point: maybe the European approach is more effective, maybe not, but I don't see why legislative uniformity is necessary.... As long as all countries are effective in decreasing the incentive/legality for spammers to exist, does it matter? Silly example -- let's say large country A fined each piece of spam at $1 million, and large country B implemented the death penalty for spamming -- I think spam would decrease a lot pretty quickly. Anyway, if several competing approaches are tried on a large scale, and one is far and away a success, others will follow suit. Please don't posit US government conspiracies to protect spammers -- all the Nasdaq-100 companies hate spam (e.g., Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple). So do 99.9% of their online constituents. Those are the parties US legislators will (at least try to) protect.
Oh yes, you're quite right, I just wanted to show where it was in the webpage. Thanks for the clarification.
Actually the NYT has already begun using google's NOARCHIVE option to prevent content caching. Here's an excerpt from the this morning's front page story's source:
i al/14IRAQ.html positions: Top5,Middle1,Right3,Middle5,Right,Travel7,Travel11 ,Bottom1A,Bottom3A,Right5,Right6,Right7,Right8,Bot tom8,Bottom7,Inv1,Inv2,Inv3,Frame4,Right4 kwds: politics+and+government;international+relations;ir aq;suggested%5ftopnews;suggested%5finternational;s uggested%5fworldspecial;suggested%5fmiddleeast --
!-- ADX SETUP: page: www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/international/worldspec
meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOARCHIVE"
Kind of makes me wonder what's the point of the story, since it even says there's an easy way for concerned parties to opt out of the cache.
Haven't there already been other projects with similar design goals, like the Self-certifying file system? The authors of SHFS say it's a hack, which has a few drawbacks -- e.g., in generic write operations on non-Linux machines, a separate write() system call is used for each byte! Can anyone comment on the relative merits/demerits of the alternatives?