[afnog] UCEPROTECT-Network Level 3, who takes the blame?

[Bill Woodcock]

      On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, John Walubengo wrote:
    > it looks like UCEPROTECT opted to do exactly
    > what i did - it may not be right, but it does provide a
    > quick relief of sorts, with casualties ofcourse.

Walu:  Actually, I suspect that you did something more intelligent than 
UCEPROTECT is doing...  You blocked all of AccessKenya's networks, which 
took out some of their other, non-spamming, customers, but basically 
aligned the incentives in the right place.  If AccessKenya had a spam 
problem with their customers, it was up to them to fix it.

Now, whether they do or don't isn't really of personal concern to me.  
That sort of thing works itself out through exactly the pressures we're 
seeing here _as long as everybody acts rationally_, as you you did.

The problem I see here, specifically, is that UCEPROTECT isn't blocking 
just the provider with the spamming customers, they're blocking the entire 
/16, which contains a lot of _entirely unrelated_ ISPs, in completely 
different countries, with no relationship whatsoever with anybody who's 
having a spam problem, and no special leverage to get them to fix it, even 
if they did know who it was.  This is like pulling a random hostage off 
the street, and telling them to stop crime.  It doesn't help the crime 
problem, and it causes a problem of its own.

So regardeless of whether AccessKenya has customers who send spam (many 
ISPs do, at some point; what's important is whether they clean it up), I'd 
say the real problem here is UCEPROTECT not being responsible about who 
they're blacklisting.

                                -Bill