Interesting article and some of the comments are even more insightful than the article itself. I think i agree with Anonymous (22. August 2010), who explains the futility of the whole attempt, s/he laconically summarized it like so:
That to make the internet useless for bad people, it must also be made useless for good people. You could literally firewall the entire damned thing to where the  internet passed only ICMP echo requests, and do you know what would  happen then?  Spammers would resort to hawking viagra via ping packets  fired in morse code, hoping to reach ham radio operators looking in the  general vicinities of their DSL modems' RX LEDs.  (I'm *not* kidding.)
And sadly enough s/he's right.