Slicing up spam
Page 2

 And that's why the "free speech" arguments around spam never impressed me much. Advertisers... regard email as just another medium like television or radio or the postal service. Spam is protected free speech, and just as natural as receiving a print advertisement by mail. But with postal ads, the advertiser pays the production and distribution costs, whereas the costs of spam are incurred by internet companies and passed on to the consumer. Spam doesn't just waste our time -- it also costs us money.

That's only half of the equation, though. We all pay for it, but spam must also be making money for someone. Marketers measure the effectiveness of their tools with a 'hit rate' – the proportion of people who saw a TV ad, or received a spam email, who actually bought a product. An advertiser paying a few cents per viewer will measure that cost against the profit per sale and calculate if the medium and the ad are worthwhile. Ideally you want a satisfying hit rate, like maybe 1 per cent, indicating one in a hundred viewers of the ad bought something. But what if the advertising is vanishingly cheap? Through the shadowy networks of email marketing companies and their subcontractors, sending spam to millions of people can cost just a few hundred dollars. Even if the hit rate is just a few people in a million, the advertiser will still make money on the deal. There doesn't need to be “a sucker born every minute” because one in a million will be enough to pay for the whole transaction.

So despite a terribly low hit rate, spam is cheap for the sender, and internet users collectively end up paying the bill. So why don't we find a way to stop it? There is no silver bullet to kill spam, either legal or technical. Proposed anti-spam measures have often concentrated the control of email in the hands of a few major industry players, and that concentration is dangerous. Despite the high cost of spam, we must find a way to maintain email's decentralized and anarchic character. In just one example, Zimbabwe's government shut down the last remaining privately-owned newspaper in the country a year ago, but the journalists continued to publish using private email distribution. If a few major service providers become a choke point for email, then governments, spy...