SPEWS operates "spam traps", email addresses designed to capture spam. When spam mail is detected, SPEWS sends a complaint to the originating network. In theory SPEWS sends staged complaints as more and more spam is received from a given source, culminating in a listing for the network on the SPEWS blacklist. The listing, in turn, expands further and further as more spam arrives. This can result in the blocking of large ranges of IPs, even whole hosts.

Unfortunately nobody seems to want to take responsibility for the content of the list. A visit to news.admin.net-abuse.email shows numerous examples of requests for removal from blacklists being ignored or scorned by admins who support SPEWS. The prevailing attitude is that spammers and people who look like spammers can go to hell.

In the case of somethingawful this attitude has been compounded by a somewhat juvenile campaign of message spamming on news.admin.net-abuse.email, which has probably undermined what little hope the site had of being delisted. The spamming was carried out by somethingawful forum members incensed by what they saw as the unfair blocking of the site's email. Obviously this is the wrong response, if only from a PR point of view. But the whole string of events raises a number of important questions about who controls the internet and what they want it to be.

Like any community, many email admins, or at least those who take an active approach to spam-fighting, regard themselves as something of an in-group. Mre importantly they hold a special power that is in some respects unassailable. Short of hacking a provider or breaking into their network centres, most people haveonly supplicant status with respect to the admins who keep their data flowing. The responses to spamming and trolling by SA "minions" in the net-abuse.email newsgroup show that perhaps the worst thing you can do is piss off an admin.

Is there any way to make the power of admins subject to some universal principle or law of the internet? It's hard to say. What separates the internet from so many other aspects of our lives is the fact that it is so heavily mediated. From person to computer to cable to network there is constant control and redirection exerted over data. The equipment and software needed to keep the internet running has to be maintained by somebody, and those people must necessarily have privileged access to the guts of the system.