AnarchoCyphertopian technologies (wasRE: [extropy-chat]Reccommendations for a mailing list)

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Brian Atkins <brian at posthuman.com> wrote:

> Mike Lorrey wrote:
> > You aren't looking at the opportunity cost. If yahoo didn't have so
> > much of its bandwidth (and disk space) soaked up by spam, it could
> > afford to give me 10 gigs of disk space for free.
> > 
> 
> Hmm, no I think Yahoo would not have purchased all that "spare
> capacity" in the first place if it hadn't been forced to by the spam.
> 
> There may be viable financial reasons to offer 10 GB of free space,
> and if there are then Yahoo will do it. It isn't dependent on having
> spare space sitting around, or if it is then they would have to 
> sharply limit the number of eventual users to prevent the business
> model from entering an unprofitable mode.

If spammers are taking up your bandwidth and disk space, you don't have
it 'spare' sitting around, its being wasted by people who are not
paying you for the use of it. You either find a way to make them pay
you for use of the space, or find a way to block them. We hear of them
blocking sources of spam, but my spambox (which doesn't count toward my
200meg limit but does count toward their bottom line) still fills up. I
do like that they've invested in some very effective spam filters that
rarely bump real traffic to me and rarely let spam traffic through, but
that is also costing yahoo money that it isn't getting from me and
could be used to pad their profit margin or increase my level of
service, or both.

=====
Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
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