Like the fight against smoking and drugs, resistance to spam can never wipe it out
December 17, 2006
Checked your e-mail box recently?
If it is anything like mine, before you get to that party invitation, the message from your mom, or even the possible job offer, you will have to click through a large pile of rubbish that has slipped through your computer's software and the local broadband network.
Stock offers, lottery wins, offers of partnerships from deposed Nigerian dictators, requests for information from banks you don't have an account with, and dozens of marriage proposals from girls called Lenka. That's right, we are talking about spam, unsolicited bulk e-mail advertisements. That wonder of modern technology brings a whole seedy, disreputable world right into your home or office computer.
It may not rank up there with George W Bush's war on terror, or indeed the war on drugs, yet the war on spam is at least as deserving of our attention. It may not be the worst crime in the world, but it is one that makes us victims each day.
Just as we aren't doing too well in the wars on terror and drugs, we aren't scoring many victories in the war on spam.
Maybe it's time for a new strategy. Most of the effort is going into stopping the spammers from sending their irritating e-mails.
How about we turn that on its head? To defeat spam, we must reduce the incentives to send it - since there doesn't seem much hope of winning by prohibition.
In the past few weeks, some of the world's biggest organisations have started to bare a few fangs in the battle against spam.
The EU has just released a new report urging its members to get tougher on rogue email. "It is time to turn the repeated political concern about spam into concrete actions," says Viviane Reding, the EU's commissioner for telecommunications and the media.
And the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) this year founded the Stop Spam Alliance, a grouping that brings together international organisations to clean up the internet.
"It is not legislation alone that is going to solve this problem," says Claudia Sarrocco of the OECD's information and communications policy division. "It is not regulation that can solve it either. We need to go a bit further, and bring all these tools together so that we can get spam down to acceptable levels."
Both the EU and OECD are quite right in recognising that email travels across national borders more easily than the weather. There is really no point in one country having a policy on it: that annoying e-mail is just as likely to come from the other side of the world as it is from next door (though the worst offending countries are the US, China and France, according to the EU). This is a battle that has to be fought globally.
Nor should the scale of the task be underestimated. Spam is annoying - but it is also expensive. The EU, citing security firms, says between 54 percent and 85 percent of all e-mail is spam. It quotes Ferris Research estimates putting the cost at about €39 billion (R534 billion). As the OECD says, spam "disrupts networks, cuts productivity, spreads viruses and is increasingly used by criminals who steal passwords to access confidential information".
Much of the fraudulent e-mail filling our in-boxes is laughable. Yet criminal gangs use it to prey on the vulnerable.
The trouble is, just getting tougher isn't the answer. In the EU, spam was made illegal in 2002. You can't get much tougher than that. In Britain last year, one spammer was sentenced to six years in prison.
How much harder do we want the sentences to be? Hanging spammers? Burning them alive in boiling oil? Even though I'd happily put a noose around Trent's neck for all the e-mails I've had this week tagged "Hi, it's Trent", it wouldn't make much of a difference.
Spam must be treated as a social problem, not just criminal.
We have to start thinking about the war on spam as being more like the battle against drugs or smoking. Selling drugs remains illegal, though you will never eliminate the supply completely. You have to reduce the incentive to spam.
Likewise, plenty of people still smoke. Still, decades of persistent education, coupled with increasing social pressure, have steadily cut the numbers of nicotine addicts.
But right now, we're losing the war on spam. Unless we come up with some answers, our email boxes will become unusable. And the Internet - the greatest innovation of the last couple of decades - will crash under a pile of "unbeatable, unrepeatable" offers.
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