Spammers: more than just a nuisance 

By Chris Gulker 

What happens when grandstanding politicians take advantage of spammer stupidity?

Like most people for whom email is a primary form of communication, I
dislike spammers. Spammers, if you aren't aware, are people who flood
email accounts or usenet news groups with unsolicited messages.

Spammers are the junk mailers of the Internet, and are almost universally
reviled by Internet users. They're different from their brethren who use the
postal service, however.

Unlike the mail, spamming costs almost nothing. In th U.S., it costs 32 cents
to mail a letter, meaning a postage bill of $320,000 to mail 1 million
first-class letters, not to mention printing and stuffing costs. At those prices,
postal junk mailers try to maintain high-quality lists of prospects, and gladly
remove people who don't want to get their offers.

A spammer with a "flat rtate" internet account (costing, typically, $20 per
month), can send 1 million (or 10 million) email messages for no additional
charge. There is no economic reason for spammers to bother to take names
off their lists since there's no charge associated with each message. The
spammers typically get email addresses by using software to scan usenet
news groups and. lately, World Wide Web pages.

This explains why my electronic mailboxes fill up with offers for foot
fungus remedy, pornography, cable descrambler boxes, offshore
"investment" opportunities, computer parts, books offering recipes for
"sexual drinks", term life insurance, "approved" anti-snoring devices, home
business opportunities, pornographic Web sites, patent medicines, Internet
service and phone sex, to name a very few.

While it doesn't cost the spammer much, the costs to the recipient are real.
Many people access the internet via online services, which charge connect
time fees. This means the recipient pays to receive the spammers' mail.

A bigger cost is born by the Internet itself. Spammers send hundreds of
millions of pieces of email daily, which is an enormous burden on the
already overloaded global circuits that make up the Internet's physical
structure.

Spammers are indiscriminate: they happily sell children's email addresses to
pornographers, for example. Indeed, spammers are so unpopular that it's
just a matter of time before some grandstanding politician takes advantage
of their stupidity, and proposes legislation to curb them.

The problem is that our unenlightened pols tend to propose legislation like
the U.S. Congress' recent Communications Decency Act. The CDA would
have created a world in which a couple could have legally asked a priest or
rabbi for family planning counseling by phone, fax or post, but would have
faced time in federal prison if they emailed the same request.

A much better solution, in my mind, is economic, like the one the U.S.
Postal service came up with.

U.S. junk mailers subsidize the U.S. postal system. The Postal Service has
rates and regulations that shift most of the costs of delivering the mail onto
the junk mailers. While most Americans are less than thrilled with their
postal service, ordinary users enjoy better service at lower cost than they
otherwise would. 

This, in my mind, would be a perfect solution for spammers. Internet
service providers should get together and offer rates that fairly shift charges
over to the spammers. Service providers could, for example, include 1000
email messages free with flat-rate accounts, but charge, say, 3 cents for each
message over the limit.

In this way, spammers' hundreds of millions of junk messages would turn
into millions of dollars to invest in Internet infrastructure, a la the U.S.
Postal Service. With new fiber optic lines and new, high-capacity routers
paid for by spammers, Internet service would get better, not worse. 

The costs associated with mailings would encourage spammers to be better
citizens by removing people who don't want unsolicited email. The cost
would also doubtless curb some of the ridiculous quantity of seedy messages
from very low-budget operations.

Better still, the spammers wouldn't be sitting ducks for hopelessly out-of-it
politicians looking for excuses to foist their personal agenda upon the
electronic community.