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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 disrupt their business models. 

That\'s how DVD works today: if you want to make a DVD player, you need to ask permission from a shadowy organization called the DVD-CCA. They don\'t give permission if you plan on adding new features -- that\'s why they\'re suing Kaleidascape for building a DVD jukebox that can play back your movies from a hard-drive archive instead of the original discs. 

CD has a rich ecosystem, filled with parasites -- entrepreneurial organisms that move to fill every available niche. If you spent a thousand bucks on CDs ten years ago, the ecosystem for CDs would reward you handsomely. In the intervening decade, parasites who have found an opportunity to suck value out of the products on offer from the labels and the dupe houses by offering you the tools to convert your CDs to ring-tones, karaoke, MP3s, MP3s on iPods and other players, MP3s on CDs that hold a thousand percent more music -- and on and on. 

DVDs live in a simpler, slower ecosystem, like a terrarium in a bottle where a million species have been pared away to a manageable handful. DVDs pay no such dividend. A thousand dollars\' worth of ten-year old DVDs are good for just what they were good for ten years ago: watching. You can\'t put your kid into her favorite cartoon, you can\'t downsample the video to something that plays on your phone, and you certainly can\'t lawfully make a hard-drive-based jukebox from your discs. 

The yearning for simple ecosystems is endemic among people who want to \"fix\" some problem of bad actors on the networks. 

Take interoperability: you might sell me a database in the expectation that I\'ll only communicate with it using your authorized database agents. That way you can charge vendors a license fee in exchange for permission to make a client, and you can ensure that the clients are well-behaved and don\'t trigger any of your nasty bugs. 

But you can\'t meaningfully enforce that. EDS and other titanic software companies earn their bread and butter by producing fake database clients that impersonate the real thing as they iterate through every record and write it to a text file -- or simply provide a compatibility layer through systems provided by two different vendors. These companies
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