I love SPAM. No, really, I do. I buy it in the six pack from a wholesale club, and in a couple of days can eat a whole can of it by myself. You know, that pink stuff made by Hormel -- yummy! The other kind of spam nobody wants. Okay, 95% of Internet users don't want it, according to surveys. That kind of spam is also referred to as Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) or Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE).
Technically, those two aren't quite the same thing. UBE is pretty clearly unacceptable to users of the Internet. It meets two definitions:
This is the definition you'll find with Spamhaus. More definitions are available:
UCE has a wider definition, and would include those messages targeting you specifically, or a small select group. According to some, this is less objectionable. I have to admit that once or twice I've received commercial messages aimed at me that were acceptable, only because it was a genuine offer of something I wanted -- twice in 8 years of using e-mail. In terms of ethics, I'd say if you send me such a message, you are taking a risk. If I don't want it, and I find it personally offensive, I'll complain to your service provider. I won't take the risk of responding directly to the sender, unless I am certain of whom I'm addressing.
"It's Just Advertising"
So spam is a form of advertising. Advertising has become a major portion of our economy now, because we are over-bought. I'm convinced Fred Reed has it figured out:
The Industrial Revolution was the real villain. Supply -- of virtually everything -- outstripped demand. Used to be, nobody had squat. In say 1850, there was a vast pent-up demand for refrigerators, air-conditioning, and computers, even if nobody had heard of any of them. So when some rascal invented, say, a washing machine, everybody charged out to buy one. A washing machine actually had a purpose, so you didn't have to advertise. Pretty soon everybody had everything he needed or could reasonably want. Warm dry house, plenty to eat, appliances, car, shoes.
Yet factories in their reckless lunge toward ill-considered fecundity produced more junk than anyone in his right mind could conceivably want. Things kept getting incontinently invented. You know, electric toothbrushes with New Miracle Bristles, or strangely colored toothpastes.
The stuff piled up and threatened to unbalance the planet, causing it to break into asteroids. Advertising exists to sell people things they wouldn't buy if left to themselves, spreading the weight of the electric tooth brushes and thereby saving the earth. ["Peddling Ourselves to Death"]
We've all met the super-salesman, or the marketer who has no concept of ethics. They care nothing about people, nor what consumers want or need, only whether they can persuade folks to spend money. If it were possible to literally manipulate folks into buying a product, I am convinced there's nothing some of them wouldn't employ to make it happen. And if they can't force you to buy the product, they're determined at least to force you to see their ads.
In our wider modern culture, we have typified door-to-door salesmen, telemarketers, and used car dealers as universally despised. Some sales pitches just go too far. On the Internet we usually don't mind having to wade through the occasional advertisement as the price of access to our favorite media. Most of us have gotten used to banners, but we usually draw the line at annoying flashing stuff with disturbing color combinations, Flash ads that are too busy and tasteless -- and don't even try pop-ups and pop-unders. Yet we recognize the economics of what amounts to entertainment, even if the ostensible purpose of that entertainment is information. That's because we have taken the webmaster's invitation to visit their website. I even click through once in awhile, just to see what some clever ads are about. The true entrepreneur seeks only to inform, and knows that it's well worth it to entertain you in the process. Not every marketer is stupid.
The Economics of the Net
We tolerate these things out of a sense of fairness. Most adults can accept what they seek on the web is worth putting up with a few ads. After all, it takes money to run this thing called The Internet, and it takes money to offer up information on a webpage. Like all else in economics, it's a matter of meeting the consumer's demand at a price they'll pay. Those with really great content will draw thousands and can afford to place just a few ads and charge a great deal for them. Those with junk content and junk ads have to resort to domain name hijacking and other dirty tricks. Most of us have seen sites with certain popular key words on the page used in searches, nothing but ads with no real content.
I won't go out of my way to confront most pitchmen if they don't actually bother me. When the advertiser bears a significant share of the cost for their ads, we all generally bear them with grace. When they can shift the cost to others -- officially referred to as "externalizing" their costs -- we rightly take exception. In principal, I refuse to pay for you to present your commercial message to me. In essence, that is what spammers do. They are the bottom-feeders of marketing and sales. I pay for access to my ISP, I pay for the mail account space on the servers, and I pay for the phone line that brings it all to me. Then I pay for the computer on which it resides, and the power to run the thing. I have an inherent right to control what happens in that process, because I'm paying my own way, not harming or taking from anyone else. For someone to pay virtually nothing to force their advertising on me is unethical. For them to force me to pay on top of that is immoral. Now magnify that by the millions out there hit by that one unwanted broadcast message.
Estimates of the problem vary. As I understand it, nearly 75% of all traffic on the Internet -- all traffic -- is spam. If you run a business and get hit with a wave of spam, it costs time and resources to deal with it. If you run a large service provider, you really have to fork over for spam. CAUCE does an excellent job of discussing the financial cost issues. There are other costs: If this keeps up, spammers will have the Internet so completely bogged down, no other traffic will get through.
Yet money remains the issue. Spammers send spam because it makes money. Now, I have never seen a UBE message offering anything of value. Most spam invites you to fall for a fraud. Though the vast majority of those with money to spend know this, still the spam traffic grows. There are a few fools who will buy this crap and that's what pays. That tiny handful who fall for it is enough to make spammers stay at it. Precious few would bother spamming if they didn't get fat checks from either the fools or the vendor who took in the fools.
Nature of the Beast
In just the last few years, the landscape of spamming has changed. At one time there appeared several different kinds of spammer: get-rich-quick types, businessmen who didn't know better, small-time shysters with a new toy, etc. These days the whole thing is divided between two kinds. The handful of dedicated professional spammers own a batch of servers and work through a collection of commercial Internet providers who are infamous for doing nothing about spam complaints. These hardcore business types often have employees or subcontracts. The favorite ploy is to use a free e-mail account or a cheap one, make a single spam run, then abandon it. There are also the criminal Internet gangs. These mafias mostly use the vast pool of "zombie computers" -- those hundreds of thousands of machines connected to the Net that have been compromised. Most new malware today are part of the effort to enlarge this pool. Once the virus, worm or trojan has installed itself on the target computer, it's open to outside control. These are then leased out to spammers and such by the people who wrote the evil software.
Spammers may or may not own the site to which they link in their messages. In a certain sense, who does the actual spamming is really not that important. The source of the problem is two-fold: (1) somebody will pay spammers to bring clients and (2) somebody will provide the means for these crooks to keep drawing fools who have money. We might not be too worried about fools and their money; it's hard to protect fools from their foolishness.
However, if we do not stop the spam, we may soon have no Internet. Objectively, that might not be the end of the world for some, just the end of a good opportunity, not to mention one terrific hobby. For many, though, it's far more personal than that. And for businesses, it's likely to be far worse than mere bankruptcy of this or that company. While some argue the world economy could withstand the shock, I doubt that's true anymore. Like it or not, we have so thoroughly wired ourselves into the Internet, we can no longer do business without it.
Pardon me if this sounds melodramatic, but I believe our very civilization has come to depend on the Internet. Like many people today, I try to keep an awareness of more than local or national issues. I confess to a very low opinion of global politics, but I am hooked on the global culture possible only with the Internet. Folks I've never seen, because they live at least 8 time zones away, are some of my closest friends. I can keep in touch with them frequently via e-mail. I don't know about you, but I'm not giving that up without a fight.
Ed Hurst is Associate Editor of Open for Business. Ed is also the Music Director for Grace Baptist Church of Kickapoo Creek, Texas. He loves computers, runs FreeBSD and GNU/Linux and reads all sorts of things. You can reach Ed at ehurst@ofb.biz.