All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites

All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites
Cory Doctorow
[email protected]
For the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
San Diego, California
16 March 2005
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AOL hates spam. AOL could eliminate nearly 100 percent of its
subscribers' spam with one easy change: it could simply shut off its
internet gateway. Then, as of yore, the only email an AOL subscriber
could receive would come from another AOL subscriber. If an AOL
subscriber sent a spam to another AOL subscriber and AOL found out
about it, they could terminate the spammer's account. Spam costs AOL
millions, and represents a substantial disincentive for AOL customers
to remain with the service, and yet AOL chooses to permit virtually
anyone who can connect to the Internet, anywhere in the world, to send
email to its customers, with any software at all.
Email is a sloppy, complicated ecosystem. It has organisms of
sufficient diversity and sheer number as to beggar the imagination:
thousands of SMTP agents, millions of mail-servers, hundreds of
millions of users. That richness and diversity lets all kinds of
innovative stuff happen: if you go to nytimes.com and "send a story to
a friend," the NYT can convincingly spoof your return address on the
email it sends to your friend, so that it appears that the email originated
on your computer. Also: a spammer can harvest your email and use it
as a fake return address on the spam he sends to your friend. Sysadmins
have server processes that send them mail to secret pager-addresses
when something goes wrong, and GPLed mailing-list software gets
used by spammers and people running high-volume mailing lists alike.
You could stop spam by simplifying email: centralize functions like
identity verification, limit the number of authorized mail agents and
refuse service to unauthorized agents, even set up tollbooths where
small sums of money are collected for every email, ensuring that
sending ten million messages was too expensive to contemplate
without a damned high expectation of return on investment. If you did
all these things, you'd solve spam.
By breaking email.
Small server processes that mail a logfile to five sysadmins every hour
just in case would be prohibitively expensive. Convincing the soviet
that your bulk-mailer was only useful to legit mailing lists and not
spammers could take months, and there's no guarantee that it would get

their stamp of approval at all. With verified identity, the NYTimes
couldn't impersonate you when it forwarded stories on your behalf --
and Chinese dissidents couldn't send out their samizdata via disposable
gmail accounts.
An email system that can be controlled is an email system without
complexity. Complex ecosystems are influenced, not controlled.
The Hollywood studios are conniving to create a global network of
regulatory mandates over entertainment devices. Here they call it the
Broadcast Flag; in Europe, Asia, Australia and Latinamerica it's called
DVB Copy Protection Content Management. These systems purport to
solve the problem of indiscriminate redistribution of broadcast
programming via the Internet, but their answer to the problem, such as
it is, is to require that everyone who wants to build a device that
touches video has to first get permission.
If you want to make a TV, a screen, a video-card, a high-speed bus, an
analog-to-digital converter, a tuner card, a DVD burner -- any tool that
you hope to be lawful for use in connection with digital TV signals --
you'll have to go on bended knee to get permission to deploy it. You'll
have to convince FCC bureaucrats or a panel of Hollywood companies
and their sellout IT and consumer electronics toadies that the thing
you're going to bring to market will not