Graabein's Journal: Internet Death Penalty

This is my first ever journal entry, so bear with me.

I'm very much disappointed with the CAN-SPAM act. As far as I can see it won't reduce the amount of SPAM in the least, only maybe make it easier to filter. IF the law is respected and IF it's enforced. Those are two big ifs and I'm not very hopeful. In any case it won't reduce the load on my mail servers (at the time of this writing over 100,000 SPAM messages per month).

So I came up with the Internet Death Penalty.

Well, better try to come up with something effective than just sit on my butt and complain, right? Some people got quite upset and most people thought it too excessive (see replies to my comment linked above).

This prompted me to expand on my idea.

Highlights:

• [...]

  I want these anti-social misfits punished by society, I want the common good to prevail over the stupidity and greed of a few scam artists and I want this to happen in a civilized way (through laws and law enforcement).

  If that doesn't happen we will have no recourse but to fall back on technology and in that case we will simply have to declare parts of the 'net as seedy neighborhoods with which we want no contact.

  [...]

  The Internet Death Penalty would have to be a voluntary thing to implement, it would have to be based on solid evidence and it would of course have to include a way for reformed netizens to get back on 'net. In order to work (think publicity) it would have to target whole organizations (a company or an ISP), not individual servers. I would like to suggest that this is not as extreme as some people think, in fact it is no different from what (responsible) ISPs already do to customers who don't heed warnings and continue to send out SPAM: Cut them off from the 'net.

  Yes, I'm serious. I've had enough. Anyone with me?

  [...]

I'm not denying that this is extreme, but what else is there?