Freedom - I won't
All of this is not acceptable to SAs and mail administrators, and to a lot of system
owners wide and far. They are the undisputed overlords of their own domain(s), equipment
and last but not least their users: the permission a user of a system can give ends with
the system owner. A removed user has no permission for anything at all, indeed all past
"permissions" of a user are revoked the instant an account ceases to exist, as if
it never existed.
To reign in this old reality, and drive it home to newly surprised spammers and
"87% permission-based marketers", noone could have said it better than Michael Rathbun
with his
"Story of Nadine", particularly his
commentary, where he describes Eric Frank Russell's classic short story
"And Then There Were None"
(1951):
[..]
It describes an anarchistic society governed
by the principle "Freedom - I Won't". The society works because every individual
has the freedom to say "I won't" when presented with some demand from another individual,
even if that demand is for satisfaction of an obligation incurred by the first individual.
Although this means that anybody is free to default on his or her obligations to others,
it also means that the others are likewise free to say "I Won't" -- to shun the defaulter,
to decline to cooperate.
The Internet appears to be the first sizable human society that actually works on the
"F-IW" principle. The socioeconomic structure of the Internet is well summed up in a
comment by the character Masahiko in William Gibson's novel Idoru:
"There are no laws here, only agreements."
Subject only to the agreements and contracts that an Internet entity has with its providers
and customers, that entity is absolutely sovereign within its own domain. Service providers
and system administrators are completely free to decide to accept or reject any network
traffic they choose; they simply must accept whatever reactions such decisions may evoke
from those with whom they have agreements.
[..]
In this sense: To spammers and email abusers the world over: F-IW. You have no rights.
Being able to access (and send email) to our systems is a privilege, not a right.