Day 6: The War on SPAM

Wish 6: Global SPAM legislation

In early 1998, I presented our findings on the accessibility of the Internet to the United Nations. One of our concerns was what we called email Accessibility.

Since we were dealing with how people of different countries use the Internet, we identified email as the one thing that was not within the control of the users. Since users are at the mercy of senders of email, proper consideration was needed when sending to countries with low bandwidth.

For example, back in 1998, the country of Nigeria was connected to the Internet by a single 33.6 modem. And it was only available for about 10 hours a day. That connection was courtesy of a private company that needed to keep in touch with it's home base somewhere in the West. Each kilobyte transferred costed a lot of money.

It wasn't until the following year that the term we were looking for had emerged. It was called Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE). Soon after, it was called SPAM.

The single point we were driving at was that SPAM robs poorer countries of their valuable bandwidth.

If in 1998, I frivolously sent an uncompressed photo of my daughter and her dog to a new friend in Kyrkyzstan, it won't cost me much. But it would sure cost the Kyrkyz Republic plenty. That photo would have tied up their entire Internet connection for about 20 minutes.

Our report remained just that: a report. It was published, and it was not acted upon. Back then, we told them that there was going to be a problem with email that was going to be much bigger than viruses and hoaxes.

Today, my three published email accounts receive the equivalent of 1 SPAM message every minute. My filtering software has stopped about 1 Gigabyte of unsolicited email in the past year; although I have to manually remove perhaps another 250 MB worth. That's me alone. I'm sure everybody with email has their own story.

American businesses are spending millions to fight SPAM. And they are losing billions in productivity. If one country finds a way to stop SPAM, the SPAMmers will just use another country to send from.

Nobody should ever force me to read their pitch. That should be my choice. That is the reason I deep-six'd my fax machine.

Stopping SPAM requires leadership from many countries. They should declare war on SPAMmers. Had the UN used our argument that SPAM maims a poor county's capacity to compete in a global market, sweeping legislation would have been in place before the millennium. But now that all but a handful of countries have full Internet connections, it isn't a good argument anymore. But it's still a very expensive nuisance.