Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Arnold Kling wonders at Corante how The World of Ends idea applies to spam:

The World of Ends would seem to imply that the only weapon against spam is end-user filtering.  Any attempt to stop spam at the network level would require opening up packets and looking at them, which violates the world-of-ends principle

Instead, he suggests:

It is almost impossible to enforce a law against sending spam.  So we should try to pass a law against responding to spam.

What I propose is that any American who makes a purchase based on unsolicited email be fined $10,000 and jailed for 30 days. 

This is reminiscent of Chris Rock's suggestion that we make guns freely available but charge heavily for ammunition: If I want to shoot you, I'll first have to come up with $5,000 for a bullet.

But the World of Ends principle — which comes straight from the End-to-End argument by Clark, Reed and Salzer, and from Isenberg's Rise of the Stupid Network — doesn't say that no services can ever be built into a network, only that it's generally better to move services closer to the edge. So, as Arnold suggests, perhaps that means that spam needs to be trapped by the ISPs. I don't know if that's the case, but it could be.