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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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JUNE 10, 2003
Before Spam Brings the Web to Its Knees To halt the scourge ISPs, Congress, tech outfits, and big thinkers are chewing over charging for messages, regulations, smarter filters, and more Last May, Amanda Bernard's e-mail box was suddenly deluged with 20,000 identical messages. For weeks, the flood stopped the 32-year-old New Yorker from using her account. "Every time I tried, my computer froze and crashed," Bernard remembers. "I eventually had to get a programmer friend to go in and delete everything." Since then, she has been hit five more times by hundreds of pieces of spam from direct marketers -- but never to the point where her PC has crashed and burned. Oh, and what was that crucial message that Bernard received 20,000 times? "How to make my penis bigger," she laughs. No wonder spam has become a scourge of society. In a single day in May, No. 1 Internet service provider AOL Time Warner (AOL ) blocked 2 billion spam messages -- 88 per subscriber -- from hitting its customers' e-mail accounts. Microsoft (MSFT ), which operates No. 2 Internet service provider MSN plus e-mailbox service Hotmail, says it blocks an average of 2.4 billion spams per day. According to research firm Radicati Group in Palo Alto, Calif., spam is expected to account for 45% of the 10.9 trillion messages sent around the world in 2003. E-mail has made the Web the most socially interactive medium in history, and spam is rapidly turning it into the most cluttered. If something isn't done, e-mail will become unusable and the Net -- the greatest communications medium of modern time -- will be taken over by hucksters and pornographers. Spam would become the ultimate killer app. WHAT IS TOO CHEAP? Since the beginning of the year, Congress has introduced four bills to can spam. Technology companies such as Brightmail, McAfee (NET ) and Symantec (SYMC ) are trumpeting sophisticated filters that block suspicious e-mail before it enters your in-box, as well as permission-based schemes that require recipients to approve e-mail from unknown senders before they'll be delivered. Corporations, fearing a loss of productivity and the reaction of workers angry at being propositioned online, shelled out $120 million in 2002 on antispam products, according to research firm International Data Corp. In a sense, spam may be too much of a good thing. True, plenty of junk communication existed pre-Internet, but there were -- and still are -- accompanying costs. Telemarketers have to pay the phone company to interrupt you during dinner, and organizations you have no interest in supporting have to pay the post office to send their solicitations. But spam costs almost nothing to reach hundreds of millions of people. So, here's the question for technologists, economists, and legislators: Is there such a thing as communication that's too cheap? The surprising answer is probably not. History shows that lowering communication costs usually has more advantages than disadvantages. Fighting in the War of 1812 continued for three months after the Treaty of Ghent was signed -- because it took that long for the news to reach soldiers in New Orleans. In today's world, falling communications costs have improved efficiency, increased productivity, and in the process created a global society. And there is such a thing as good spam -- information and sales pitches that Web surfers ask to be sent their way. or at least have agreed to receive. NOT LIKE COUNTING COWS. It's simply in the grand tradition of capitalism that someone would find nefarious uses for such a powerful tool. The worst violators use stolen credit cards to set up fake accounts and send millions of messages in hopes of getting enough replies to make it worth their while. Whatever comes back is gravy, because spammers don't pay the price -- ISPs do. Witness the case of Howard Carmack, the so-called Buffalo spammer. On May 7, ISP Earthlink (ELNK ) won a $16.7 million judgment against Carmack for sending out more than 825 million e-mails over two years from various Earthlink accounts. According to Mary Youngblood, Earthlink's abuse manager, the bandwidth costs for Carmack alone totaled more than $1 million. He has also been charged in state court with identity theft and forgery. If convicted, Carmack faces three-and-a-half to seven years in prison. Regulation is one way to rein in future Carmacks -- if only someone could design the right kind. The Interior Dept. stipulates how many head of cattle can graze on public land. The Environmental Protection Agency regulates what level of pollutants companies can release into the environment. But unlike cows and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), spam isn't that easy to qualify or quantify. Hundreds of come-ons for sex may be spam to one person, while hundreds of come-to-Jesus messages will be spam to another. ISPs can't be sure what to block, any more than legislators can define what to outlaw.
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