AOL is now blocking spammer's websites

The Washington Post has an article up that discusses AOL's new policy of blocking the websites of spammers.

The idea is that if you can't successfully stop the spammer's from sending out spam, perhaps the large ISPs can have a go at blocking the path to the merchandise.

Say a spammer is sending out bulk e-mail that is selling an herbal sexual enhancement pill and the e-mail contains a link to their website which would allow a small fraction of the millions that receive the e-mail to buy said product. AOL is now preventing any of its users from seeing that web page, therefore preventing a large portion of the net access to the site.

This means the spammer has even fewer people that are going to buy, and if all ISPs participated, eventually the spammer wouldn't be able to stay in business.

The main issue with this is that is that it 1) goes against a bunch of privacy rights (which by being an AOL customer you would then effectively waive by signing the contract), and 2) is open to abuse.
As for privacy - who is your ISP to tell you what sites you can and cannot view, or what you are or are not allowed to purchase? You are paying them for the ability to view web pages over their lines. You are not paying them for automatic censorship of what they feel you should/shouldn't see.
As for the abuse, there is the obvious idea that company A could send out spam looking like company B in an order to get their competitor's (B) site blocked.

It is also the concern of extortion - what if AOL (or some other ISP) starts blocking these sites but has a policy, in order to regain lost revenues in other areas, where if the spammer wants their site relinquished again - they will pay a recurring fee over some period of time.
What if this went beyond just spammer sites, but what if ISPs started limiting content and charged extra to either/both the end user and the site host if they wanted to get through to each other - sort of a cable company business model.
This is not how the net should be manipulated.

While I do see the problem spam poses to large ISPs (huge costs in terms of bandwidth, server load, disk space, and loss of frustrated customers), I don't think this particular "solution" is one that will work or is even appropriate given the potential for abuse.

Posted by Eric at March 20, 2004 03:37 PM | TrackBack