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Comment by technobabbler | Hacker News Reader

I can't be the only one who's noticed that most of these companies are above the law...? When was the last time someone even got a slap on the wrist? Some class action lawsuit that gave a coupon for 10% off your next purchase?

Spam got better because Gmail, not because the law did anything...

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Spam got better because email delivery became an industry. You can’t get email delivered at scale yourself, and all the businesses have a long term reputation to protect by following best practices, of which „the law“ is part.

I don't think the law really had much to do with it, vs reputation based blacklists and SPF and such that the email industry created to combat spam.

I'm not saying this because I'm anti government, I just don't remember any of the spam laws doing anything, historically, vs the technological defenses invented by the community.

Hell, almost all of the spam I get these days is FROM the government begging for campaign donations, because they so thoughtfully excluded political spam from the laws. Gee, thanks. Now I just globally block anything from NGP VAN.

if anything we are lacking a law. A law ensuring a government backed email system comparable to USPS for regular mail

Just as the USPS allows for personal mailing, each person should be provided an email address that has unhindered access to send email to any other email address in that domain. government ID required for the email address, so there is accountability if you abuse it the same way you would be held accountable for mailing dangerous goods from your home mailbox

Mm, seems like the costs of that would way outweigh the benefits...

An email system with the speed of the USPS, the ease of use of the DMV, the security of the social security system, and the billing of the IRS. It already sounds like a digital gulag, lol

Haha I know what you mean - but realistically all the government really needs to do is provide specification and fund it, while having the courts uphold its reliability.

for example, Google could provide the service - but they would have to avoid co-mingling the service with their existing one. They wouldnt have the same rights to the content within the email as they do with a gmail account. And they wouldnt be spam filtering small businesses into oblivion for trying to talk to each other directly.

technically the service can be fulfilled by multiple vendors adhering to the same specification.

If the law had nothing to do with it, then why would excluding political spam from the law do anything?

It doesn't. It's just ironic. They end up in my spam box thanks to Gmail not thanks to the law.

Okay, that makes sense. I'm in the UK and voting spam outside of obvious political groups like the EFF that you would have signed up to doesn't appear to exist.

In the US, our campaign finance is heavily corrupt. There is no public finance system so candidates beg for money anywhere they can. Our 2020 elections spent nearly 15 billion dollars between our president and our congress. Some of that money comes from candidates directly asking for money. Other times, supposedly independent organizations (superpac) working to further the cause of a candidate, but not directly working with them, will also try to fundraise and campaign on their behalf without direct coordination. There is no limit to the amount of money such an org can get or spend, because the conservative Supremes ruled it an expression of free speech. Other conservatives worked to mask the sources of funding for such organizations.

Political activity was specifically excluded from our already sad and almost never enforced spam laws. Further, individual campaign donations are considered a matter of public record. So individual donors get recorded in these databases, and then private companies like NGP will harvest those databases, cross reference / deduplicate people with other databases, figure out their email and text contacts and then sell that information to candidates and parties who will in turn use it to spam you nonstop across email and SMS for every subsequent or similar election.

Good times.

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