|
|||
|
Back to the Forum Archives As soon as I could, I went on line to register our phones. Registering was a piece of cake. The link for registering is listed on the Wesoomi Publishing website in the government links page. Help yourself. I registered our two phones in one visit. Within seconds I received an e-mail that allowed me to confirm the registration. That's all there was too it. There are a few things I did not like about this. First, there is a three month delay for the thing to take effect. That allows the scum to continue harassing us in the interim. So-be-it. We have managed up until now by simply hanging up. Another problem is more significant. The rules exempt too many of the worst offenders. These include any business that we ever did business with. They can continue to harass us. Still, this registry is a good idea which will have significant effect. Of course, every columnists has written about this registry. One, Pete Waldmeir writing for the Detroit News, sang a familiar refrain to which I fully agree. It goes something like this: When can we do the same for spam? I have heard a lot of rationalizations and some outright lies about this for the various "authorities." A favorite lie is, spam is impossible to stop because it is too difficult to identify the source. When that comes from a government official, it is probably just ignorance. When it comes from someone in the internet business it is a deliberate lie. Almost all spam comes from scumbags who have internet accounts with Internet Service Providers like AOL and Earthlink. These provides can and do monitor the traffic that goes out from their clients. They have to do it for billing purposes. The government could stop most spam if it wanted to. A simple law would do it. The law would require service providers to put a surcharge on e-mail above a certain amount. Everyone should be able to send a reasonable amount of e-mail, perhaps 25 to 50 missives per week. Any more than that should be taxed at $0.10 per piece. If it reached a critical mass the charge could go up to $1.00 per piece. One big problem right now is spam does not cost anything. When people send us garbage through the US mail it costs a great deal and the cost is increasing. That's why we get less and less of it. We need to tax spam so the cost is proportional to the nuisance it causes. Half of this tax could go to the government and half to the provider. This would be a bonanza for the service providers and a boon to the victims of spam. That's almost everyone. The government could use the extra money to provide internet access for school kids. It is true a dishonest person could set up their own servers to bypass this tax. That has apparently happened already. According to what I read a certain piece of flotsam in Southfield Michigan has done that. The thing is, we know who he is, we know who they are. These turds could be sued by the routing companies for using their equipment illegally. We could even have a law forbidding that kind of operation. In addition, one person with a good attorney could organize a class action suite against those swine for using our computers illegally. While we are on that subject, what is wrong with the law that now prevents solicitors from using our fax machines to send us advertising? It seems to me the principle is the same. Why can't our government just borrow the text from that law. Just change the name and change the word fax to computer and we would have an anti-spam law. I get a bit tired of these dishonest service providers and
lazy government officials resisting this needed change with nonsense
arguments. It can be done. It is not too difficult. The Government
and the service providers have a responsibility to us which they
are shirking. That's all!
|