Email as facility is a public good whether it constitutes a commons or not... If wasn't you wouldn't bother putting up a server that would accept unsolicited incoming connections on behalf of yourself and others, doing so is generically non-rival and non-excludable although not perfectly so in either case (what public good is).
On 10/27/11 21:26 , William Herrin wrote: > On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 11:59 PM, Dave CROCKER <d...@dcrocker.net> wrote: >> On 10/28/2011 5:44 AM, William Herrin wrote: >>> A commons is jointly owned, either by a non-trivial number of private >>> owners or by all citizens of a government. >> >> The practical use of the term is a bit broader: >> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons> >> >> As rule, the term gets applied to situations of fate-sharing when actions by >> some affect utility for many. >> >> You cited air pollution. The Internet can suffer comparable effects. >> >> Spam can reasonably be called pollution and it has a systemic effect on all >> users. For such an issue, it's reasonable and even helpful to view it as a >> commons. > > Dave, > > I respectfully disagree. > > If you throw pollution into the air, it may eventually impact me or it > may blow somewhere else. Mostly it'll blow somewhere else. But as lots > of people throw pollution into the air, some non-trivial portion of > that pollution will drift over me. This is the so-called tragedy. > > By contrast, if you send me spam email, you are directly abusing my > computer. The linkage is not at all amorphous. You send to me. I > receive from you. There is no "all world" or "local area" destination. > If you send without some specific pointer in my direction, I won't > receive it. Ever. > > Imagining spam as a tragedy of the commons disguises its true nature > as a massive quantity of one-on-one abuses of individual owners' > computers. Worse, it forgives the owners of the intermediate networks > for shrugging their shoulders and turning a blind eye to the abusers. > > Regards, > Bill Herrin >
