When I come home from a long day of class, one of the first
things I do is check my e-mail.
Without fail, every day I open my Mozilla Mail program and
I’m greeted with at least “30 new messages!” I do
not pretend to be so popular or important as to receive so many
e-mails from people I care about. The truth is, most of the e-mail
is spam ““ part of an ever-growing problem that is finally
receiving a little (emphasis on little) legislative attention in
Congress.
Unfortunately, I don’t need to go into a lengthy
explanation of what spam is. Anyone who uses e-mail is familiar
with the ridiculous number of offers for “debt
management” or millionaires who are just itching to teach you
how to become rich just like them. And you can’t forget the
porn.
These spammers claim to have all the answers, but the answers
are of a dubious nature. If someone actually found the miracle
solution for losing weight and looking young forever, you would
think they could find a better way to advertise than through
annoying spam.
Spam, however, has become more than just a minor annoyance.
According to recent studies, spam accounts for anywhere between 30
percent and 60 percent of all e-mail sent within the past year. The
Federal Trade Commission reported that the economy is losing an
estimated $10 billion to $87 billion each year due to loss in
productivity resulting from attempts to fight spam. Small Internet
businesses, such as Bruce Goldberg’s online T-shirt shop, are
being forced to shut down because of the costs of trying to find
legitimate customer e-mails among all the unsolicited junk.
“You could say that spam finally shut me down,”
Greenberg recently told The Daily Press of Hampton Roads, Va.
So what does Congress do about this problem that threatens to
become even worse in the future if left unchecked? Well, the Senate
passed a bill that doesn’t really do all that much. The
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing
(CAN-SPAM) Act, which was approved unanimously in the Senate about
a week ago and is expected to go to vote in the House of
Representatives sometime very soon, does nothing to prevent
spammers from continuing to send unsolicited e-mails. Instead, if
it makes it through the House and the White House, the first
anti-spam law would require e-mail users to send a response to each
and every piece of spam that would ask companies to stop sending
them e-mails. Only then are companies held accountable for their
spamming ways.
There are several problems with this bill. First, it is much
easier to simply hit the delete button to get rid of e-mails that
promise to give you a bigger erection or bigger breasts than it is
to open each one and hit the button that unsubscribes you. The
responsibility is placed on the wrong side of the issue. It’s
like passing a law that says robbing convenience stores is
perfectly legal unless the owner explicitly asks you to put the
shotgun down.
Second, tracking down companies that propagate spam is
incredibly hard due to cutting edge encryption techniques and the
fact that many companies operate from overseas.
Third, if a company is caught spamming users who have gone
through the trouble to ask them to stop, it is not within the
victims’ rights to sue them. Apparently Congress thinks only
the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and Internet
service providers should be allowed to be compensated for financial
damages incurred upon other people.
Also, since the CAN-SPAM bill provides no new funding for
governmental agencies to enforce the new law, it is questionable
how good of a job these agencies will do. It seems as if more
thought went into creating a clever acronym for the bill than
creating a worthwhile bill itself.
Even the lawmakers don’t seem to have much faith in their
own bill. After the vote, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was quoted in
BusinessWeek as saying, “The odds of defeating spam by
legislation alone are extremely low, but that doesn’t mean we
should stand idly by and do nothing about it.” Come on,
Senator! Didn’t they teach you in the political world? If
you’re going to vote for a bill that you know is a steaming
pile of crap, at the very least don’t let on that you know
it’s steaming.
Spam has been around since the beginnings of e-mail. It is an
inevitable consequence of the system ““ just as junk mail is
to the postal system and telemarketers are to telephone service
““ only more annoying and even more harmful. There will need
to be significant technological steps taken, along with stronger
and harsher legislation, in order to defeat spam. Maybe then we
will all be able to go back to the days when we could check our
e-mail in peace.
Vaszari is a third-year cybernetics student. E-mail him at
jvaszari@media.ucla.edu.