ZDNet News (Ziff-Davis Publishing at http://www.zdnet.com) August 4, 1997, 5:45 PM PDT
UUNet Technologies remained silent about becoming the first major Internet Service Provider to have a "Usenet Death Penalty" carried out against it. But an anti-censorship group called the action heavy handed. And some smaller ISPs said the anti-spamming action represents the Catch 22 in which the controversy has caught them.
The "penalty," which went into effect Friday, subjected UUNet, of Fairfax, Va., to cancelbots, programs that remove any newsgroup post originating from a particular service provider. The loose coalition of system administrators who issued the "death penalty" said they were responding to UUNet's alleged failure to reduce the amount of spam originating from its service.
Spam, the Internet's equivalent of junk mail, is widely considered one of the leading nuisances of the Net, as it clogs up mail and news servers, usenet newsgroups and users' email accounts with irrelevant messages and unsolicited advertisements. The "death penalty" is a weapon system administrators have been wielding for some time to cut down on the amount of spam.
UUNet, which bills itself as the world's single biggest ISP, isn't the only major access provider to have faced such an extreme measure. Larry Plumb, director of communications for Bell-Atlantic Internet Solutions Inc., said the company avoided a similar sentence from the usenet coalition by beefing up its anti-spam policy two weeks ago.
Dennis McClain-Furmansky, a representative of the anti-spam group SPUTUM, which invoked the penalty, explained that the "death sentence" would have only a modest impact on the amount of spam end-users see, because many individual network administrators had already been cancelling spam coming over the UUNet network. Instead, the administrators imposed the blackout in the hope of forcing their UUNet to acknowledge the spam jam. "The effect we intend from this is to urge UUNet into tackling their spam problem," McClain-Furmansky said.
Not everybody in the wired world wholeheartedly supports such heavy-handed measures. "This is not unlike the Mafia hit man who tells you to pay his boss or he'll shoot you," said Dave Hayes of the Freedom Knights, a group opposing Usenet censorship. "What right do the cancellers have to judge the public worth of any usenet messages?"
And some ISPs feel they're caught in a catch-22: If they filter out E-mail from certain other ISPs, customers start to complain.
"It's a losing battle -- we're damned if we do and damned if we don't," said Phillip Burkhart, vice president of San Francisco's CRL Network Services. "We've tried to filter out sites that traditionally send spam, but when you do that, there's always someone that says they need to reach it, their brother-in-law gets their E-mail from there."
With additional reporting by Renee Deger