Spam net threat is yet another myth

So saith the growing "spin" of a certain circle of pundits and one that Jack Russell picked up on this week. I'm sorry Jack took this one hook, line, and sinker, because it falls into the category of other great Net whoppers such as the grand "Internet crash and burn" theory espoused by "Ethernet" Bob Medcalf and the "Porn sites drive Internet Innovation" crowd.

While Spammers are indeed loathsome creatures and lower than lawyers on the food chain, don't buy the hype about them being a threat to anyone other than themselves. The "threat to Net operation" is the latest piece of anti-spam propaganda being waged in a dirty war that has only grown more ugly with each passing year. Anyone stupid enough to get into the spam business without taking sufficient precautions will find himself getting death threats and other forms of harassment.

It was only last week that a United States court defended the right of an anti-spam web site to post the names, business addresses, and phone numbers of spam-operated companies. Apparently, information of public record was being used by third-parties to make life miserable for the company owners. I do not advocate harassment, but I do support the right of every consumer to complain both to their service provider and the spam company.

Spam companies do not operate in a void. They have to buy their connectivity and hosting services from larger "Tier 1" providers. Because of spam, all Internet Service Providers have had to establish "acceptable use policies" for their services. Failure to abide by acceptable use policies (i.e. do spam, don't hack) would result in termination of service. The few ISPs that didn't implement acceptable use policies quickly became homes for spammers and shortly thereafter became pariahs and ultimately bankrupt from lack of business. It is an open question as to why the ISPs of 2003 - or their upstream providers - are not shutting down spam operators by using and applying acceptable use policies.

Furthermore, the unsung war against spam has not been a one-sided one. Attempts to keep black-lists and to block IP addresses originating spam have resulted in lawsuits by spammers claiming violation of trade, harm to business, and other bunk. Since the anti-spam people are typically volunteers with real jobs and the spammers have deeper pockets, a couple of law suits tends to discourage the most pure minded.

One of the many traps people fall into when they say "The Internet" is to assume that it is a single entity and can be bound by a single set of laws. It is far more instructive to think of the Internet as a United Nations of operations - a bunch of larger and smaller companies that cooperate together for the common good of everyone to make money. These companies are distributed around the world.

Jack proposes the cop-out of last resort - "Legislative action." Whenever I hear this phrase, I remember another one introduced to me by an old friend in Texas - "I fear for the Republic." Legislative bodies around the world can't agree on even how to tax "The Internet." And how many elected politicians would you trust with correctly understanding and implementing a half-decent solution, hmm? I suspect there will be a law or laws to ban spam ultimately put on the books in the States, but such a ban would simply drive it off-shore - akin to Internet gambling. If Cuba and North Korea didn't have such crappy backbone network connections, I have no doubt they'd be spam havens.

AOL has the right idea and I'm not really a great fan of 'em. Sue spammers for abuse of network. (Press link is here).

It is costing AOL a lot of money and heartburn to both deliver spam and to respond to customer complaints about spam. Further, AOL has the deep-pockets and legal advice on tap to successfully prosecute a case against spammers. My only request to AOL would be to provide a mechanism whereby individuals and companies could provide support to the effort. Maybe I'm dreaming, but a class-action suit against spammers on behalf of numerous ISPs and supporting users might provide a good dose of reality to put a stake through the heart of spam operations. µ