Today, at the ITU’s anti-spam conference
with 60 nations represented, one of the uncontroversial themes is that
spam will only be solved by cooperation by people in different
countries.  (What is still controversial is who should be
cooperating exactly, and where resources should be best placed.) 
The most striking moment to me was the statement by a gentleman from
Syria that his country came to learn exactly what they can do to
cooperate with big players in the spam community.  His comment,
along with a few others on the same theme, was met with hearty
applause. 

Several speakers have responded to the Syrian representative’s call by
noting that there are a number of things that prospective cooperating
nations need to do before collaboration makes sense.  One trouble,
some experts have noted, is that an infrastructure needs to be in place
in each participating country (a spam law, an enforcement process, and
the like) before collaboration makes any sense.

The Syrian put it to the conference organizers and all
of us speakers and panel chairs: give us something we can do and we’ll
do it.  He struck at the perennial conference problem of plenty of
talk and rarely much action.  The energy in this room in Geneva,
though, suggests that, if desirable, there are lots of people
interested in cooperating to solve this problem.