[anti-abuse-wg] Question about spam to abuse inbox

In message <m28s7hkyr8.wl-randy at psg.com>, 
Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:

>we are in a 'maturing' industry...

That excuse might almost be a reasonable justification for bad behavior
and even worse operating policies if it hadn't already been in continuous
use for the past 20+ years.

The spam problem has existed on the Internet since the late 1990s.  May
we optimistically hold out some hope that this industry might be able
to get its shit together by, say, 2045?

>so margins are low and people are overworked and underpaid. 

Maybe margins are low *structurally*, because just like in the spam trade,
everybody and his brother got enticed by the low barriers to entry in the
commercial hosting business, resulting in tens of thousands of "me too"
operators that, in point of fact, have no commercial advantage, and thus
no reason to even exist.  And they are all now competing with tens of
thousands just like them, as well as trying, vainly, to compete with a
few othjer outfits you may have heard of, e.g. Amazon, Google, Microsoft.

"Margins are low" is the same excuse that polluters used back in the day
for dumping toxic waste into rivers in the dead of night.  Now it is being
trotted out as an excuse for an inability... or rather an unwillingness...
to do this simple things (like blocking outbound port 25) needed to stop
the effluent of spam from leaking out into and onto the global Internet.

Profits may be in short supply in the commecial hosting business, but
fortunately there is never any shortage of lame excuses to justify the
status quo.


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  I am at pains to stress that essentially 100% of *all* network abuse
of ALL KINDS these days originates from commercial hosting providers.

I do not, in general, get spam, or break-in attempts, or port scans, or
any other such abuse from government networks, from academic networks,
from non-profit associations, or from legitimate businesses that have
their own netblocks and that are not fundamentally in the Internet
services business.  Nor do I have to endure such crap from any of the
thousands of so-called "eyeball networks", e.g.  Comcast, etc.  Rather,
the sum total of essentially all network abuse these days is consistantly
emanating from commercial hosting providers, and specifically from the
ones that have elected to entice miscreants and criminals to their
services by having deliberately loose contractual policies or else
deliberately loose enforcement of their stated policies.

It's a fairly moronic way to try to make a living, or to turn a profit,
but I guess that when you have nothing else to offer in the way of
competitive advantage...