When Facebook banned blockchain-related ads it was understandable - they are a closed platform and can chose to accept whatever content they decide to.
When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair to punish researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiasts for a technology that is used by millions of people.
What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.
A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. My company is a Mailchimp customer and has never sent an email mentioning blockchains, ICOs, or anything related, but this news means that we will never use them again.
Strongly disagree. A cornerstone of Mailchimp's value proposition is its email deliverability, and its one of the best in the industry at landing emails in people's inboxes. Anything that could compromise that reputation would be a huge blow to their business. ICO and blockchain emails can make spam filters go crazy, I've seen this first-hand. Mailchimp can't control how spam filters work, but it can control, in a broad sense, how it permits customers to utilize their platform.
Mailchimp shouldn't fall on its sword and harm the delivery of its thousands of customers because some people like the blockchain.
I gave tagged email addresses out to a couple ICOs a while back, and they have been repeatedly sold off and sent spam by completely unrelated companies (usually through Sendgrid, incidentally - though Sendgrid has been good at shutting them down for anti-spam policy violations after the fact).
The ICO industry in general has shown its lack of respect for securities law (though there are exceptions); why would they adhere to a less well-regulated standard like opt-in for email?
The thing is, this is only incidentally about deliverability. Mailchimp cares about deliverability, sure. But ICO related email is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of messages they send daily for non-crypto related businesses, and having 0.1% of traffic related to ICOs isn't going to meaningfully impact broader deliverability. In addition, Gmail's smart enough to tell the difference between individual senders on Mailchimp's platform.
Mailchimp cares more about stopping email abuse (e.g., users sending spam to purchased lists) than they care about ensuring good deliverability. The two are closely related, but there are distinctions - the former is based on specific standards and policies, and enforced at a lower level than the latter.
I see this move as: considerations around widespread lack of opt-in standards for ICO related senders, plus concern over the level of fraud occurring in ICOs, and potential liability resulting from that.
Edit: reviewing some of the ICO spam I've received, about 30% of it has been obviously fraudulent/phishing - using lookalike Coinbase or Binance domains to try to trick people into sending tokens to a fraudster, for example.
You might be surprised how specific Gmail's filtering ability is - inbox/spam delivery for an identical message can be different for each recipient, based on individual behavior towards similar messages. Gmail is more than capable of blocking an individual Mailchimp sender that's spamming while leaving the rest unaffected.
This is exactly what I assumed caused them to make this decision.
Who knows, a lot of Mailchimp employees might even really like blockchain tech, or be intererested in ICOs, but at the end of the day, if serving ICO/blockchain mail results in lots of emails marked as spam, it puts their whole business at risk.
Also, they could be held legally liable (or at least: party to a suit that suggests their legal liability) that they don't want—it's risk mitigation. But the question is: What of the other ostensible scams on their platform?
A middle-ground alternative might be to say, "Hey, delivering blockchain/ICO emails costs usn% more than your average email. Therefore, we will still deliver them, but at n% the usual price."
It's a little like UPS/FedEx charging more for hazardous-material shipping.
If n is large, it will have a similar effect without feeling like MailChimp is out to censor cryptocurrency.
Except it's not a pure cost thing. Delivering blockchain/ICO emails impacts the deliverability scores of everyone else routed through those same domains and IPs. It's incredibly difficult to pin that to a number, because it's hard to quantify in advance how much of an impact one customer's blockchain emails will have on your IP/domain reputation.
The only way to make it a pure n% cost is to isolate the individual customer or all blockchain-email customers to a dedicated set of IPs/domains that can have their own (probably: really shitty) reputations. At that point, it's highly likely you'll go through all that effort just to take money from people and still not be able to deliver their email due to catastrophically low reputation infrastructure.
Refusing to accept the impact to your other customers of a hot spam topic is not "censorship". People really need to stop misusing this word. Mailchimp is a business, and has every right to take reasonable steps to protect their customers. It's already pretty common for porn and get-rich-quick businesses to be refused by these services, largely for the exact same reasons.
The problem is that the cost of Blockchain / ICO spam does not just fall on Mailchimp as a company, it falls on MailChimp's customers, who have to suffer through reduced email deliverability (for the same cost they are already paying).
Other than that, MailChimp is a private company, not the government, and can damn well serve who they want.
But why should they? Doing that brings very little upside for MailChimp and a lot of potential downside if Google decides to blacklist MailChimp's entire IP range.
And then they have to devote engineering / moderation resource to routing emails to the correct IP shard.
Mailchimp has offered dedicated IPs for years - the code and operational processes around that are already established. Gmail also rarely blocks at the IP level, especially for an established provider like Mailchimp.
Ultimately, this is first and foremost a policy decision around the extent of fraud in ICOs generally, and secondarily related to many ICOs' lack of adherence to Mailchimp's anti-spam standards.
It's common for businesses to turn away customer segments that could be antithetical to their ability to service the rest of their customers. For example, many credit card processors will turn down businesses with higher rates of fraud, like strip clubs. That keeps everyone elses fees lower and lets them operate a more efficient fraud department.
On top of that it's hardly like Mailchimp has some sort of monopoly. There's dozens of ESPs and turnkey email platforms that will welcome blockchain business... they just don't have Mailchimp's inboxing rate.
I'd guess that the spam filters probably go crazy because users actually mark this kind of email as spam.
If so, this is the system working. People say something is spam, and less of that kind of email gets sent.
The most likely reason the spam filters go crazy because there is a huge amount of bona-fide ICO and blockchain related spam, and they can't tell the difference between that and emails that users actually want.
But the way we detect bona-fine spam is by user reports. We then train models / decide heuristics based on these reports, but in the end, users decide what they report.
They banned "Week in Ethereum" feed so you don't know if they are banning your email using the word "pepsico" because they found ICO in a simple search regexp or even Ethereum in different contexts.
I completely understand banning ICO spams which at the end are just spams.
i dont think its only that. there is also the aspect of being a target of tons of hackers trying to hack they way into ICOs accounts and gaining access to all users registered for ICOs and sending them mails trying to scam them to send the Ether to some other address.
I saw it happening first hand.
So a handful of criminals are ruining it for everybody else.
Im not even talking about some of the ICOs being "scams", what clearly is the case and happens.
They could easily route riskier traffic over a separate set of ips and domains without affecting delivery of other domains. This is standard practice in the industry.
They're not "censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology"; read their policy carefully:
>>> It’s important to note that this update to our policy does not prevent the discussion of related topics in messages sent through our platform. For example, journalists and publications may send cryptocurrency-related information as long as they’re not involved in the production, sale, exchange, storage, or marketing of cryptocurrencies. <<<
Unfortunately, the reality is: there's a LOT of fraud associated with the production, promotion and sale of ICOs, and it's no doubt creating expense, risk, and overhead for Mailchimp.
As a private company, it's entirely proper and reasonable for them to prohibit activities that directly affect their business.
This isn't a remotely new or unique precedent. Mailchimp and every other email marketing company have always had lists of prohibited content categories.
>>not involved in the exchange of cryptocurrencies
... seems overkill. So any journalist who has actually transacted with Bitcoins is off the platform? That seems like mainly negative effects from the standpoint of "selecting for informed journalists".
"Sure, you can use our platform to talk about cryptocurrencies, as long as you're just one of those admire-from-a-distance types."
Ditto for production -- that would include e.g. anyone who's contributed code.
>A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott.
You're being ridiculous and disingenuous.
MailChimp has long had a list of Prohibited Content and Sending Subject to Additional Scrutiny that include "perfectly legal" items: https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/
When you signed up, where was your heartfelt cry for liberty for people selling pharmaceutical products, credit repair services, daily horoscope reports, or mortgages and loans?
This is just a pet issue of yours and that's why you're upset. Don't pretend this is some great violation of principles.
And I would add that spam, in the US, is "perfectly legal". CAN-SPAM, even if it was aggressively enforced, effectively only requires marketing email to contain a valid postal address for the sender and a working unsubscribe link - it doesn't require opt-in.
I disagree with this, not from the moral arguments that you are making, but from the importance you're seemingly placing on this vertical. E-mail delivery and marketing services are by far the most open market of those that you've listed. For example,
- Google has locked in publishers, so by banning blockchain ads, an advertiser knows their ad will never appear on a given set publishers. No way around that other than working with each publisher themselves; a difficult task to overcome.
- Facebook is still the leading social media network in the world, and not every user regularly uses multiple social networks. With those ads being banned, you know a user who isolated themselves to Facebook will never be seeing blockchain ads through a social media platform.
- Mailchimp? I don't see any exclusive factor to their business. They might be great at deliverability or a leader in their space because of their business processes, but a new company can easily pop up and be able to reach out to the same set of users. It's not like users only select to receive email from Mailchimp.
Mailchimp's business is specifically to get around spam filters. An ICO only email company would be almost useless without being able to leverage all the 'legitimate' traffic to lower their profile.
> An ICO only email company would be almost useless without being able to leverage all the 'legitimate' traffic to lower their profile.
Right, but it's feasible for any other company to build a product that delivers e-mail as effective as Mailchimp to the exact same audience. There isn't an implicit or explicit audience limitation in this case.
With such a high rate of ICO fraud, how can you blame them? They don’t want to be held liable in the numerous lawsuits that are to come. They also shouldn’t be burdened with doing due diligence for every ICO to dertermine if they might be aiding and abetting fraud.
It’s probably temporary until there is some regulatory guidance in place.
IANAL, is this a real risk? This sounds like suing a paper company for a ransom note written on it's paper. You can bring a suit for nearly anything but it feels like there would be a lot of precedent to immediately dismiss it.
Nah, I don't think they're in any legal risk. I'm sure their ToS says they can shut down anyone who uses their service for any reason. In addition, it's not like this is an overnight move or they're deleting people's information -- they're giving them weeks which should be more than enough time for affected customers to migrate to a different service.
They wouldn't be held legally liable. (CDA Section 230.) The real problem is that ICO emails tend to set off spam filters, and this could damage the deliverability of all mail originating from MailChimp.
"They also shouldn’t be burdened with doing due diligence for every ICO to dertermine if they might be aiding and abetting fraud."
Legally speaking you are perfectly right - they can do whatever they want. But morally speaking they can't - if they have put themselves in a position where they are so popular and making so much money that it is in the general public's best interest for them to censor certain scam artists, then they should invest into content moderators. I have no idea how many people they would need to reliably sort through all the content and only block the scams. But it is the price they need to pay for deciding to censor a specific topic. Otherwise the price is being paid by all the researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiast, who have nothing to do with the scam artists.
This issue basically boils down to big corporations (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mailchimp) being too lazy to do the right thing.
There’s no “right thing” here. These companies will do what they legally can to ensure their bottom line is as healthy as possible. If that means making broad strokes, cutting corners, and inflicting collateral damage on customers that are situated in fraud-laden landscapes, they’ll do it.
What if there were actual Nigerian princes who truly wanted help with currency exchange and were offering a real mutually beneficial business opportunity? Would you expect Gmail to hire a team to weed out those emails from spam? If they don’t, are they “lazy”?
How many people do you think there are who are genuinely interested in hearing about opportunities to transfer wealth out of Nigeria for an unknown prince? I bet it is not a very common interest, so Google are not being lazy for not investing more manpower into it.
However, millions of people are searching about blockchain tech and are reading blockchain-related publishers every day. That is why any company which decides to censor them instead of investing resources into moderating the content is being lazy. Those companies' focus should be on their users' trust because without it they would have never achieved their bottom lines.
> How many people do you think there are who are genuinely interested in hearing about opportunities to transfer wealth out of Nigeria for an unknown prince?
Depends on whether they’re doing it on the blockchain!
There are no legitimate Nigerian prince emails. There are legitimate coin emails.
Blocking all coin topics like Facebook and ICO emails like MailChimp goes beyond “spam filtering” into big brother territory.
These companies are free to do as they please - and I’m going to boycot and avoid them. There is a line between “we’re helping!” and censorship and Silicon Valley is definitely crossing it.
FYI, MailChimp is based in Atlanta, GA. Maybe you mean to use "Silicon Valley" as a catch-all for tech, but I don't think it's fair to associate SV with anti-ICO attitudes in this way. The anti-ICO sentiment is coming from everywhere, and I think it's pretty legitimate.
You don’t think Google, Facebook, Amazon are setting the stage for what is acceptable? Ok, replace with Big Tech if you want.
And yea, I get it, you can’t possibly understand something that doesn’t directly effect you - yet. When something you consider good is censored maybe you’ll get the idea of acceptible precedent? “First they came for <x>” and all.
FWIW, I hate ICO and consider crypto commodities a waste in general; but I know “nudging” when I see it.
I bought a fair amount of crypto to flip in the short-term, but on the other hand I don't believe the technology has proven itself to be anything more than a fad. I'd like to see a lot more regulations put on it.
They don't have a moral obligation to use their infrastructure, brand name, and legal funds on something they think is risky or unethical. This is much the way UPS can decline to transport whatever they want to.
If it bothers anyone, they can use one of the many competitors or send the emails themselves.
100% agree and it's nice to hear you're exercising your right as a consumer by boycotting Mailchimp. Having said that, can't Mailchimp do whatever they want? They're a company with their own set of rules and priorities. Seems fine to me as long as they disclose it to customers.
I think those are two separate issues: Google has positioned itself to be the lifeline of the open internet and have profited tremendously from it. With that comes a responsibility to not censor content. Otherwise it stops being the "open" internet and becomes another walled garden with dubious rules that can change at any moment (e.g. Facebook).
Mailchimp can do whatever they want, I agree, but as their customer I wouldn't expect them to censor me in any way. They have built a very profitable business on top of a free protocol. Deciding to censor how people communicate through that protocol seems unfair.
I genuinely can't fathom this argument at all and it seems rather widespread in these parts.
For one thing I'll keep strongly objecting to the use of "censorship" for something as mundane as this. It's a strong word, a private company saying that you can't do X or Y on its own turf is not censorship. If you tag the walls of a McDonalds and you get thrown out it's not censorship. If you're using Mailchimp and they say "we don't want to deal with that anymore" it's not censorship. If they based their decision on race, sexual orientation or religion it might be discrimination but Bitcoin is not officially a religion yet.
For systems that have a quasi-monopoly or a very dominant position such as Youtube it's true that it can be a problem. Not being able to post your videos on Youtube will probably reduce visibility a lot. That's still not a free-speech issue though, it's a monopoly/lack of competition issue. The solution isn't to force Youtube to host your content, it's to work on having competition in the video hosting space.
In this case though it makes no sense. Email is an open infrastructure, anybody can start sending emails whenever they want. You don't have to ask anybody for permission, setup postfix on some dedicated server and mail away.
It's a strong word, a private company saying that you can't do X or Y on its own turf is not censorship
It absolutely is censorship. They may have every legal right to do it, but at the end of the day, they are restricting broad categories of speech, it's censorship, end of story.
Furthermore, "your own turf" never is and never has been a carte blanche to do anything you want - certain regulations and obligations, both moral and legal, kick in when you open a business to the public.
Not if you don't want to deal with antispam bullshit, you don't. Try spinning up a new server, do the usual PTR/DMARC/SPF dance, and send any large quantity of messages in an automated fashion - like a regular mailing list that people have affirmatively indicated they want. Many of them simply will not get there.
If this were not a problem, Mailchimp and friends wouldn't have a reason to exist. The reason I call this censorship is because your options for large-quantity emailing are to sign up with a company like this (and subject yourself to their terms), or just deal with the fact that many of your messages will never arrive.
> Not if you don't want to deal with antispam bullshit, you don't.
The entire point of this move is part of their "dealing with antispam bullshit" service. What Mailchimp offers is not mail delivery. Anyone could provide that cheaply at near-unlimited scale. What they offer is the opportunity to piggyback on their good reputation as senders. Maintaining that reputation is necessary for the operation of the business.
> just deal with the fact that many of your messages will never arrive
This isn't quite right. It's more that your messages will be rejected at the destination.
I go through my mail once every couple of days, and I've learned to recognize "refinance with us" or "sell your house" mail by sight and throw it away unopened. Now, if I see an envelope that says (for instance) "Internal Revenue Service", I'm going to open it up. That's because of the good reputation (in a certain sense) of the sender.
The mortgage people could slap "IRS" on their mail and have a lot more people open it and read it. They would also have a number of stern, suited people come by to discuss federal law with them. But that wouldn't be censorship. It's not censorship to withhold your endorsement of someone else's communications.
Yes, if you want to send bulk email you'll need to play by the rules of the receiving servers. It's not easy but it's doable, as evidenced by the multitude of Mailchimp competitors and self-hosted systems like Sendy.
Just because it's not as easy as using `<?php mail(); ?>` doesn't mean Mailchimp has some kind of monopoly that makes their acceptable use policy the same thing as censorship.
> Not if you don't want to deal with antispam bullshit, you don't.
So, in a way, Mailchimp is actually in the business of getting around censorship in the form of spam filters?
That's where people should be directing their ire, those anti-free speech spam filters that prevent an honest businessperson from filling up their inbox with a multitude of "great offers".
Oppression in the first degree, that's what I call it...
>Otherwise it stops being the "open" internet and becomes another walled garden with dubious rules that can change at any moment (e.g. Facebook).
Or perhaps Google isn't becoming anything, it was always exactly this and people are only now waking up and looking past Google's PR. That tripe about Google being the champion of the open Internet was just good marketing that duped a lot of people. They're not a selfless group of Internet guardians and never were. Anyone who ever thought otherwise, who ever bought into their "Don't Be Evil" nonsense is a gullible mark.
More broadly, maybe this and other recent experiences might help shatter the idea that Silicon Valley and the giant tech companies are not the benevolent stewards of the global infrastructure that they paint themselves as.
Do you let anyone post under your account name? If I were to ask for your credentials to your HN account, would you give them to me and let me say whatever I want under it?
And we keep having these discussions where we all agree "It's not censorship when it's a private company" but that's starting to feel like a truism we need to push back on, because if every private company that handles mass emailing decides to stop accepting a certain type of content (let's all agree we aren't talking about child pornography as the content), that is censorship. If this story were, "T-Mobile stops allowing text messages/ phone calls about blockchain" I think the reaction would be different even though they are a private company as well.
Email is an open infrastructure, if an consensus emerges among the existing players not to allow emails about X then you're free to start your own email service what will feel the gap. If you can't make it stick then the holy free market has spoken.
Wikipedia is currently blocked in Turkey. That's censorship. Mailchimp won't let you use them to send emails about Bitcoin. That's a minor inconvenience.
If every email service prohibits a topic, that's indistinguishable from state censorship. I fail to see how only one is bad and the other isn't.
The free market isn't of any help here either. Censorship is about stopping the spread of information and ideas. What's not known can't affect the free market.
It's distinguishable because nothing stops you from starting a new email service if you want to. You're not going to end up in jail if you start an emailing service for Blockchain projects. In many countries journalists and authors do end up in jail (or worse) because of actual censorship.
If nobody wants to host your content then maybe the problem isn't them, maybe it's you. And if it's not then there's a business opportunity waiting for you right here.
Email is nominally an open infrastructure. In reality, antispam measures and companies can render you unable to send messages in general if you annoy them enough.
Spamhaus in particular seems to have a reputation for unreasonable practices and rather unpleasant-to-deal-with people.
T-Mobile isn't a good analogy because it functions as a utility and has very few competitors. MailChimp has many competitors, including "spin up your own mail server" and "use a different marketing channel".
No, they're in fact limited by the contract they present when they offer you their service and relevant laws that may supercede parts of that contract. That would include some privacy laws.
It's not really that different from Google. Mailchimp is a marketing/advertising platform that has every right to be selective about who their clients are^1. Their entire business is about managing their reputation with customers and email providers and blockchain scams are hurting that. Trying to pretend that marketing spam is deservant of free speech considerations and tantamount to 'discussion' is silly.
Recently people seem to being bit by the fact that just because you think of a company's product as 'infrastructure' doesn't make it so.
^1 Yada yada they can't discriminate against certain classes of people. That's not even close to relevant to this situation nor am I talking about their legal abilities.
Why is Facebook's decision okay but Mailchimp's is evil? If anything Facebook has a social network monopoly while Mailchimp is one of dozens of mailing providers.
Authorities are cracking down on all the blockchain scams and now companies don't want to be associated with them. It's easier to ban all blockchain-related businesses than to look for the few select legitimate ones.
Because Facebook is blocking ads that will probably not be missed by many people. They still allow you to post about blockchain. Mailchimp apparently doesn't.
I'm getting really tired of the misuse of the word "censorship" when it comes to topics like this. Mailchimp is not censoring anything. They are not preventing those advertisers from getting their message out. What they are doing is choosing not to partner and work with people they believe might be likely scammers. Something we all do. If you want to complain about that, then you're saying that a person should no longer be able to choose who they do business with. Do you want to be compelled to buy a car from the shady dealer with a reputation for selling lemons? If not, then why should Mailchimp?
None of this is censoring. The government is not prosecuting this speech (which falls under commercial and is not completely free) and closed platforms can do whatever they want. In fact, as the last 100 topics have shown, regulation in digital advertising is sorely needed.
Email is the most open API of all, you can send people anything from anywhere using a simple email server so I don't see what the big deal is, especially in dropping a service for doing something that doesn't have any affect on your business at all.
Google already bans ads for firearms, fireworks, and tobacco products. There are restrictions on adult content, alcohol, gambling, drugs, and financial services [1].
They've always been more selective about what can be advertised, versus what shows up as the result of a search. The product being legal to buy has never been the standard.
Just if someone is sleeping at the wheel — this is perfect opportunity to create “google for googles prohibited items”. Nothing illegal in advertising these products.
> they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.
Good!
They can censor/ban whatever they want. I like it when a company takes a stand and doesn't hide behind "free speech" as their reason for not maintaining any standards.
> What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.
It's always funny to me when people think they are entitled to free speech to say or send whatever they want on other people's platforms. If MailChimp doesn't want to send your emails, they don't have to. Straight up. Their TOS also likely prevent emails about gambling, or with adult content, etc.
The same issue happened recently with youtube banning videos from fire arms enthusiasts. One might disagree with their political stance but they are entitled to do so.
It would be great if comments like yours included a disclosure of personal crypto currency holdings at the bottom
The free speech free technology bullshit is great but I personally would not hold a vendetta against a company for taking measures to prevent getting sued (or whatever their rationale is for protecting their business by doing this)
But this is a pretty predictable result of having privately owned services like this be such a big part of the Internet. MailChimp, understandably, doesn't want to be associated with this content, and they are under no obligation to allow it.
They are trying to get out of the way of the oncoming train of lawsuits and criminal charges that's going to hit us when the ICO/crypto bubble really deflates.
When Google banned blockchain-related ads it was a much more serious issue - millions of websites are supported by Google ads through AdSense and AdX. Google is the main revenue source of the vast majority of publishers on the open internet. It seems incredibly unfair to punish researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiasts for a technology that is used by millions of people.
What Mailchimp is doing goes one step further - they are directly censoring what companies can share with their customers and what they cannot. This feels incredibly intrusive whether you are a fan of blockchain tech or not.
A private company censoring people for discussing a perfectly legal technology deserves a boycott. My company is a Mailchimp customer and has never sent an email mentioning blockchains, ICOs, or anything related, but this news means that we will never use them again.