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Stability on a Generative Net 169
anyone could free-ride off of his effort to distinguish between spammers and
nonspammers. In 1999, leading Web-based e-mail provider Hotmail decided
to do just that on behalf of its customers. 31 Thus if Paul Vixie believed a particular
mail server to be accommodating a spammer, no one using that server
could send e-mail to anyone with an account at hotmail.com. MAPS was also
known as the “Realtime Blackhole List,” referring to the black hole that one’s
e-mail would enter if one’s outgoing e-mail provider were listed. The service
was viewed as a deterrent as much as an incapacitation: it was designed to get
people who e-mail (or who run e-mail servers) to behave in a certain way. 32
Vixie was not the only social entrepreneur in this space. Others also offered
tools for deciding what was spam and who was sending it, with varying tolerance
for appeals from those incorrectly flagged. The Open Relay Behaviormodification
System (ORBS) sent automated test e-mails through others’ e-mail
servers to figure out who maintained so-called open relays. If ORBS was able to
send itself e-mail through another’s server successfully, it concluded that the
server could be used to send spam and would add it to its own blacklist. Vixie
concluded that the operator of ORBS was therefore also a spammer—for
sending the test e-mails. He blackholed them on MAPS, and they blackholed
him on ORBS, spurring a brief digital war between these private security
forces. 33
Vixie’s efforts were undertaken with what appear to be the best of intentions,
and a sense of humility. Vixie expressed reservations about his system even as he
continued to develop it. He worried about the heavy responsibilities attendant
on private parties who amass the power to affect others’ lives to exercise the
power fairly. 34 The judgments of one private party about another—perhaps in
turn informed by other private parties—can become as life-affecting as the
judgments of public authorities, yet without the elements of due process that
cabin the actions of public authorities in societies that recognize the rule of law.
At the time, being listed on MAPS or other powerful real time blackhole lists
could be tantamount to having one’s Internet connection turned off. 35
MAPS was made possible by the generative creation and spread of tools that
would help interested network administrators combat spam without reliance
on legal intervention against spammers. It was a predictable response by a system
of users in which strong norms against spamming had lost effectiveness as
the Internet became more impersonal and the profits to be gleaned from sending
spam increased. 36 In the absence of legal solutions or changes at the center
of the network, barriers like MAPS could be put in place closer to the end-