Re: Proposed EU Directive on Electronic Commerce

[Ragnar Lonn <]

On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Carl Moberg wrote:

>  OK, to make this useful as a information service to customers, we would
>  probably have to define pretty "deep" structures, like
> 
>    swedish:cars:volvo  or
>    north-america:resellers:computers:spare-parts:cpu:intel:pentium
> 

Yeah but that's not really our problem so we should probably not
try and figure that out. It's the advertisers that have to agree on how to
reach their target audience. They could probably come up with something at
least remotely useful but even if they don't, there's no reason not to
give them the means to try when it doesn't cost us anything. That is to
say: I think a header that allows for the insertion of keywords is a
good thing because it means flexibility but we shouldn't specify *what*
keywords to use because that is not our, or the legislators', concern.

>  We could of course try to fight _unsolicited_ commercial e-mail and
>  actually go for opt-in and mailinglists based on subscriptions instead.
> 

Yeah well that has its drawbacks too. Mostly for the advertisers and
the people who do want advertisements.

>  Trying to filter usefulness from a river of spam would take pretty
>  complex content-based definitions and filtering.
> 

Yeah... I'm not in any way saying it will be effective. It might not
even work. But then again it might work a little and that makes it
justified to let people put keywords in the header if they like. The
important thing, however, is the header itself which defines a message
as UCE and lets anyone act upon that information.

  /Ragnar