Winning The War on SPAM

Everybody hates SPAM (except of course the Hormel Corporation). Everyone from the U.S. Government to Microsoft to your local ISP is working on ways to end SPAM. I have a good friend who recently changed his e-mail address of many years because of the hundreds of SPAM e-mails he received daily. I ended up switching e-mail clients to better filter SPAM.

Some industry experts believe that up to forty-percent of all e-mails are SPAM. The Washington Post reports that a company of 15,000 employees spends, on average, a quarter million dollars a year on SPAM prevention. America Online blocks a billion SPAM e-mails per day. To date the federal government and 26 states have some sort of anti-SPAM laws. Even so, successful prosecutions of Spammers are rare.

I believe that we need to change our focus and take a cue from the war on drugs. If we really want to win the war on SPAM — we should go after the users.

Current laws have been ineffective in stemming the SPAM tide. It is often difficult to identify the source of SPAM. We Americans tend to treat the Internet parochially — SPAM reminds us that it really is an international medium. Even if a source is discovered it may be offshore and thus not subject to U.S. laws.

Beyond the monetary cost, SPAM increases the noise level of the Internet. SPAM challenges the basic integrity of the INTERNET. To this day my wife will not use e-mail because of the stories she has heard about SPAM.

SPAM is big business — I heard on a radio show that a Florida spammer recently sold his company for over 150 million dollars. Spammers (with the exception of people who forward things to their entire mailing lists) are in it for the money. If no one responded to SPAM, if no one bought V1agr@ or tried to help the children/widows of deposed Nigerian widows — there would be no profit in it. If there is no profit in it — commercial SPAM as we know it will cease.

My solution is simple, since we have not been able to curb the supply, we must attack the demand. The parallel with the War on Drugs is clear. If there was no demand for illegal drugs in this country, the cartels would not go to such great lengths to import them.

If we really want to win this war — we must treat it like a war. We must be ready to make tough decisions. We need to pass legislation making responding to commercial SPAM a crime. By institutiong a $10,000 fine for responding to SPAM (with jail time for repeat offenders), we will show as a nation that we mean business. We could have televised public service announcements: SPAM — Just Say NO!, This is your brain — This is your brain on SPAM, etc.

If this approach fails — we could sic the Recording Industry Association of America and their lawyers on them.