Re: Proposed EU Directive on Electronic Commerce

[Carl Moberg <]

At 17:58 19/01/99 +0100, Ragnar Lonn wrote:
>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.

 Ok, what you're saying here is that we let advertisers come up
 with headerfield content syntax. Then we let customers find
 the syntax picked by the company he actually wants info
 from and give this info to his ISP. The ISP updates the customers
 filter and then we all wait for the company to flood all customers
 with spam. This particular mail from this particular company will
 actually get through the filters and reach the customer ?

 Or am I way out of line here ? 

>>  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.

 I'm having a hard time finding the problem here;

 For users:
  If you want info, go signal you want it and be prepared to pay for it.
  If you don't want it, don't expect to receive or pay for it.

>>  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.

 Going for schemes that probably won't be effective and might even
 not work, does not sound like a good thing to me.

 The information in the header will probably be as useful
 in the rfc822 mailspace as DNS TXT RR's is in a global
 context.

-- carl