http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_20/b3833045.htm

MAY 19, 2003

TECHNOLOGY & YOU

Hitting Spammers Where It Hurts

A
smart new attack on junk e-mail aims to make it too costly for spammers to
operate

You might not know it by looking at your e-mail inbox, but the tide has turned
in the war on spam.

On the surface, things are still getting worse. On May 2, Brightmail, a
maker of spam-blocking software, announced that unsolicited commercial e-mail
accounted for 46% of all e-mail traffic, up from 18% a year ago. Now, there's a
rising tide of protest from businesses and consumers demanding action. And
government and the tech industry are responding. Spam will never go away, but
for the first time since it became a real problem a couple of years ago, I am
confident that it can be drastically reduced.

The reason for my optimism is the realization that the very thing that makes
spam so vexing is also its greatest vulnerability. Sending a piece of junk mail
via the U.S. Postal Service costs 25 cents just for postage. A telemarketing
call is at least as expensive. Sending junk e-mail costs a minuscule fraction
of a penny. That's why spammers can afford to send out tens of millions of
messages and make money getting only a handful of responses.

The newly united spam fighters at America Online (AOL ), MSN (MSFT ), and Yahoo! (YHOO ) understand that the
real attack on junk e-mail should be economic, not technical or legal. For
example, each message that is blocked by filters before a recipient can see it
is a tiny bit of overhead for the sender. "Everything we are doing adds to
the costs of spammers," says Microsoft (MSFT ) point man in the
fight, MSN Vice-President Brian Arbogast. "Everything we do to
differentiate legitimate mailers from the bad guys reduces the economic
viability of spam."

The beauty of fighting spam through economics is that the approach as a whole
hits harder than the sum of its parts. However imperfect each component may be,
anything it adds to the spammers' costs increases the effectiveness of the
total strategy.

A bill introduced by Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) has
broad support and is a good starting point. It would require that all
unsolicited commercial e-mail carry a valid return address, be flagged in the
subject as advertising, and give recipients a legitimate way to get off the
list. The problem is that enforcement responsibility is given to an already
overburdened Federal Trade Commission.

A better approach is to give those who are hit by illegal spam the right to
seek damages, perhaps through class actions -- a 1991 federal law setting
damages of $50 per unsolicited fax message is a good model. Furthermore,
because many bulk mailers hide offshore, liability should be extended to the
far more vulnerable U.S. companies on whose behalf the spam was sent. Since
many of these businesses sell goods, they need a physical address that puts
them within reach of the federal courts. (The same basic approach is equally
valid in other countries.)

Internet service providers have to do their part, too. Most already will
terminate the account of any customer caught sending spam. They also need to
cut off any customer whose sites are advertised through links in spam. And the
big backbone carriers, such as MCI and Sprint (FON ), must put pressure on
the small and often sleazy ISPs that connect spam-related Web sites to the
Internet.

Critics will complain that lots of spam will be untouched by these steps. Many
pornography sites, for example, operate entirely offshore. Even some Web sites
that purport to sell goods are offshore scams that harvest personal information
for use in identity theft. The complaints are valid, but they miss the point:
There is plenty of low-hanging fruit. If we can knock off a lot of spam with
simple steps, we can tackle the harder problems at our leisure.

In the unlikely event that we could raise the cost of sending junk e-mail to a
penny a message through a combination of litigation, fines, loss of Internet
connections, and other forms of well-deserved harassment, spam would wither.
Even at a tenth of 1 cents, offers of fake Viagra, organ expanders, and cable
descramblers would become hopelessly uneconomic.

It would have been better if we had gone after spam a couple of years ago, when
the problem first started getting nasty. But the outrage had to reach crisis
levels before we were ready to act. We are there now, and I think we are about
to start winning.

By Stephen H.
Wildstrom

Copyright 2000-2003, by
The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.

Terms of Use   Privacy Policy