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The suggestions were predictable: As they have each year since 1997, with nothing to show for it so far, members of Congress vowed to enact a
On Friday morning, though, FTC Commissioner
That's exactly right, and it's how we need to start thinking about spam. Spam is not primarily a technological or legal problem: It's an economic one.
From an economic perspective, spam is just another form of pollution, an activity that imposes costs on people without their permission. Like all polluters, spammers impose these costs because of the benefits to them--in this case, the profits they make from sales, however few.
Like many victims of dirty air and befouled water, spam recipients are mostly powerless against the polluters. To curb pollution, we need to figure out how to change a polluter's cost-benefit calculations.
Yet for victims, the time and effort needed to shift costs back to where they belong typically wipe out any theoretical benefits. Because my home e-mail address has stayed the same since 1995, I receive hundreds of spam-o-grams per day, and I don't report each one to the FTC or an Internet provider's abuse address. It's just not worth my time.
It is worth something to the spammers. Here's why: Because of the low cost of bulk e-mail, a response rate as low as one-thousandth of 1 percent can mean profits. A
The usual way to address pollution problems is for the government to step in and raise costs. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.,
| To curb pollution, we need to figure out how to change a polluter's cost-benefit calculations. |
That's a good start, but it's not good enough. Roughly half of spam already comes from overseas, panelists at the FTC confab said last week, and they estimated that it's
Fortunately, there's a second way to raise costs for spammers: Charge them.
Imagine a system that lets you set up a kind of electronic guard dog that would police incoming e-mail. Using a set of user-defined rules, e-mail from preprogrammed domain names, such as yourcompany.com, would be sniffed and automatically approved. So would messages from friends, family, prior correspondents and known mailing lists.
Unknown correspondents, on the other hand, could contact you only if they paid for the privilege. Without bothering you, your guard dog would reply and tell the sender how much "postage" he owed. It's likely that a polite custom would arise: If the message you received from an unknown sender was sufficiently interesting, you'd return the payment or simply not deposit it.
I'm hardly the first person to suggest this idea.
| Imagine a system that lets you set up a kind of electronic guard dog that would police incoming e-mail. |
Whatever the system, if enough people use it, you'll only have to charge as little as a penny to effectively ban spam from your in-box forever. The higher cost of watchdog-protected accounts suddenly would make spam uneconomical by shifting some of the cost of dealing with spam back to the sender, where it belongs. Payment systems like PayPal, E-Gold and GoldMoney.com would make the system feasible.
Then again, the postage would not have to be paid in legal tender. Any activity that cost the sender enough would do the trick. One scheme that's been proposed uses computation instead of currency. Called "
"This can be used as the basis for an e-cash system measured in burnt CPU cycles," writes
Back told me on Friday that he envisions a transition from filters to HashCash. "What do you do, when you receive mail from people who are not using HashCash? Deleting that mail is not really acceptable," Back said.
"What people have proposed to do is to combine HashCash with filtering software solutions like SpamAssassin and the like," he said. "If you used HashCash to send a message, it wouldn't be filtered at all. That gives you an incentive to install HashCash. Every person gets extra value from it because they get extra reliability when sending e-mail."
Whether we end up using HashCash or some form of micropayment, we desperately need to raise the cost of spamming. New laws and new filtering technologies aren't good enough: Spam can be canned only through economics.
Biography
Declan McCullagh is CNET News.com's chief political correspondent. He spent more than a decade in Washington, D.C., chronicling the busy intersection between technology and politics. Previously, he was the Washington bureau chief for Wired News, and a reporter for Time.com, Time magazine and HotWired. McCullagh has taught journalism at American University and been an adjunct professor at Case Western University.
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