Internet Buzz with Richard Wiggins | 17

It's hard to know precisely the aggregate annual cost, but let's do a thought experiment. America Online reported to the FTC that in 1997, 1/3 of the email its users received was spam. AOL has 12 million households, and we might conservatively guess that each household receives at least one legitimate email message a month on average, for a total of 144 million legitimate email messages, and 72 million spams.

So, how much does 72 million spams per year cost? If each takes one second to recognize as spam and delete, that's over 28 months of wasted user time. When the flood of spam becomes so great that AOL's system administrators must intervene, impose controls, or otherwise help their users contend with it, that's more lost time. And we haven't considered network bandwidth, disk space, or fraud yet. That's just AOL.

Should spam be regulated? If so, why should spam be treated any differently than junk paper mail?

Regulated? Outlawed! Personally, I think that spam shouldn't be treated any differently than junk *faxes*, which are already illegal because the cost of the advertising is paid by the recipient.

And junk mail, as you probably know, is regulated in the U.S. If you send a fraudulent offer by mail, the Postal Inspectorate can go after you. On the commercial side, the Direct Marketing Association tries, albeit not always successfully, to maintain a list of people who don't want to receive solicitations by mail. We feel these kinds of "opt out" lists don't work -- for junk mail or for spam -- but they represent evidence that people do enjoy and expect a certain amount of control over what they receive in any medium.

In the book, we discuss a number of ideas about whether and how spam might be regulated, including a number of legislative and legal actions that have already been undertaken.

Most Internet users I know think of spam as only a negative thing. Are there any good aspects to spam? Does spam ever offer benefits to society?

There's a dilemma of the commons here. If no one ever spammed, and one person with a truly important message for a targeted list of people needed to get it out, that spam might offer a benefit. An example might be a product safety notice (a true recall wouldn't be spam because registered owners of a company's products have a prior business relationship with the company). The problem is that when everyone spams, the results are ruinous. So, although an individual spammed message might have redeeming qualities, spam as a whole is destructive.

Is it possible that regulations or proscriptions against spam can accidentally have a chilling effect on legitimate uses of email? Example: a sales rep sends a follow-up email to 200 regular customers about a new release of a product.

Here we've got a group of people who have a prior business relationship with the sales rep. They want this information. A good example of this is Netscape's In-box Direct service. This provides Netscape's customers with useful information, and you must explicitly choose when you register the software whether or not you want to receive these announcements. This is a model that's both business-friendly and consumer-friendly.

More...