[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Ian Mason) writes: > On 27 May 2008, at 16:33, Robert Bonomi wrote: > > > Amazon _might_ 'get a clue' if enough providers walled off the EC2 > > space, and they found difficulty selling cycles to people who couldn't > > access the machines to set up their compute applications. > > This is a classic example of externalities in the economics of security. > > Currently, any damage caused by Amazon customers costs Amazon little or > nothing. The costs are borne by the victims of that damage. On the other > hand mitigating this damage would cause Amazon costs, in engineering and > lost revenue. So in economic terms they have no incentive to 'do the > right thing'.
i've heard this called "the chemical polluter business model". > So to get Amazon to police their customers either requires regulation or > an external economic pressure. Blocking AWS from folk's mail servers > would apply some pressure, making areas of the net go dark to AWS would > apply more pressure faster. A considerable amount of pressure could be > placed by a big enough money damages lawsuit but that has a feedback > delay of months to years. to that end, i don't accept e-mail from any free e-mail provider, including gmail, nor from most ISP mail servers. all of them face this same economics decision, and all of them end up spewing quite a bit of spam, and there's no end in sight. e-mail sourcing doesn't scale. the highest quality e-mail comes from the smallest communities. EC2 will probably face some boycotts. i don't think these will change the endgame, whatever it is. -- Paul Vixie
