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War On Spam

Email users have welcomed the global broadside against spam, but tame the Internet? Won't work. Good.

By Ananya Roy

Quick, what's common to Hormel Foods' luncheon meat and the junk mail that finds its way to your email box? Okay, you got it--spam. It's a strange word, spam. It got its salience from a British sitcom starring the comedian Monty Python-as the extra Hormel meat served along with any food ordered at a restaurant featured on the show. Since then, anything you get whether you order it or not, is spam.

Like it or not, here go the spam stats...

The European Commission estimated spam to have cost businesses close to $10 billion globally in 2001. Since then, spam volumes have doubled. If you're wondering how spam weighs you down as a cost (since it all comes 'free'), picture this: unlike standard postal mailing where the sender pays for the service, the recipient bears the cost for spam by way of the fee paid for receiving mail. This is the direct cost. Next, if reading and deleting one spam message takes an approximate 10 seconds and each user gets an average of four e-mails a day, a company that has 500 employees loses 166 man-days each year just fighting spam. This is the productivity cost. And last, if something like the infamous Nigeria 419 scam happens, recipients can be swindled of millions of dollars. This is the business cost.

Like it or not, spam is a global menace.

So, what are people doing about it? Fighting a war. Or at least trying to.

Yahoo! sees technology as the problem and technology as the solution. The company has developed DomainKeys, a technology that works by targeting the spammer's practice of spoofing or changing an e-mail's header info. The US state of California has other ideas. In September 2003, it passed a piece of legislation dubbed SB 186, which prohibits unsolicited commercial e-mail messages from being sent to California addresses (or from being initiated in the state).

And has the rest of the world joined battle? Well, the US Senate recently passed the S.877 (Can-Spam) Bill that would regulate unsolicited commercial e-mail messages but would not ban such activity other than fraudulent messages. The EU, likewise, has adopted the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, which takes the opt-in approach to unsolicited commercial e-mail---allowing direct e-marketing messages only to recipients who have given prior explicit consent.

Some netgurus, however, find all this rather amusing... and to an extent, even annoying. Their argument? Information ought to be free, like oxygen --- get too much you get too high, not enough and you're gonna die. The very medium, the internet, is what it is because of the free-spread of information around the globe, regardless of those weird lines on the map referred to as 'borders', and any legislation that seeks to regulate it in any way ends up making two cardinal boo-boos. One, overstepping its domain (the internet is global and not subject to the whims of any country's legislators). And two, breaking the Hippocratic do-no-harm condition of governance (regulation, by its very nature, confers authority on someone to 'police' the Net, and since that cannot but be arbitrary to some degree, that's the swiftest way to snuff out bright sparks).

That last boo-boo, of course, is another version of the 'slippery-slope' argument. Once a regulator gets a handle on the medium, there's a lot more nannying it will be inspired to do. Keeping 'adult' material away from impressionable young minds, for example.

Perhaps an amicable solution is self-regulation, because even as this writer writes this piece, much of the information comes from the net itself. The medium sure is useful. The writer makes no claim to authority on the subject, but, as might be apparent, would certainly like to see the medium evolving much the way John Barlow envisioned it when he drafted the 'Declaration of Independence' of the internet.

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