On Tue, 2021-12-28 at 21:59 -0500, John Levine via mailop wrote: > It appears that yuv via mailop <post...@sfina.com> said: > > The first thing to make internet email viable for the future is to > > establish a defensible perimeter and keep bad actors out. Easier > > said > > than done. ... > > Unfortunately, e-mail walled gardens are a Well Known Bad Idea.
RFCs-based e-mail is a walled garden. We lawyers call this the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law is the worst form of walled gardens except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time [1] and include the single-god ruler or the Cult of the Bitten Fruit. Does not mean that whe sould not work to improve the Rule of Law. > The short version is that any collection of people large enough to be > interesting is also large enough to have people you don't want to > hear from. And this is why any society needs policing and walls. Most likely that your home has walls, and if you live with significant other(s) you have common rules. Your country most likely has prisons -- walls to keep people you don't want to hear from off the streets -- and borders -- walls to keep other kind of people you don't want to hear from off your streets. Walls are a matter of cost/benefit, not a matter of Bad/Good. Pragma vs Dogma. > The slightly longer version is whatever criteria you use to decide > whose mail to accept is unlikely to match the set of people whose > mail you actually do want to accept, and the more hoops you expect > people to jump through, the more likely it is that people will decide > they weren't all that eager to send you that contract proposal. The general analysis is that two parties decide between themselves what means of communication to use, and mail has no monopoly on that. Sometimes, one party has sufficiently more power to impose the use of a specific means of communication. Few parties restrict themselves to a single means of communication. In my experience, alternative means of communications to internet email are gaining traction because the hoops (cost) of participating in internet email are growing past the pain point. I have seen contract proposed and accepted over Twitter. In popular parlance, the Garden of Eden is the image that comes to mind when a walled garden is evoked: paradise inside, hell outside, insiders naked and exposed to the whims of a single capricious ruler. The walled garden of RFCs is more hell inside than outside. The guardians of the walls keep adding layers of complexity with questionable benefits. Where there is an alternative, participants are leaving in droves and eventually the guardians of the walls will find themselves alone, naked in their own RFCs. Where there is no alternative (the telecom's oligopoly on subscriber lines), participants pay the cost and market forces drive some competition, imperfectly. [1] < https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form-of-government/ > -- Yuval Levy, JD, MBA, CFA Ontario-licensed lawyer _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
