According to an article in the January 3, 3002 edition of Information Week (a weekly magazine covering the information system and technology world), the majority of respondents to a Harris Interactive Poll stated that government should make mass spamming illegal.

Before we continue, let’s define what “Spam” is on the Internet: Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail. Spam greets you in the morning with subject headings like “SEE TEEN GIRLS LIVE NOW!” and “REFINANCE YOUR HOME NOW!” and “BUY NAME-BRAND SOFTWARE AT DIRT-CHEAP PRICES NOW!”

The survey was conducted Nov. 22 to Dec. 2 on 2,221 adult Web surfers. It found 80% of respondents today say they're very irritated by Spam, compared with 49% almost three years ago. Ninety-percent found unsolicited sex mailings very annoying. Right behind porn on the most-hated list are offers for mortgages (79%), investments (68%), and real estate (61%). (See Story Here).

According to an article published on ZDNet News in August 2002, Spam traffic was an estimated 36% of all Internet traffic, up from 8% from the year before.

What I found interesting in both of these articles were individuals proclaiming that legislators should enact laws banning this type of e-mail. In the ZDNet article, a guy by the name of Steve Linford, Director of the London-based SpamHaus Project stated “We are hoping that the U.S. government will bring in a federal anti-spam law…That will take care of the majority of the problem. If the United States passed a restrictive law, other countries would be more likely to follow.”

”Free Speech Is A Fine Thing…Unless It Intrudes On My Life”

So, what does this discussion have to do with politics and government? The concept of free speech. You know, that thing in this country called the First Amendment.

Before you groan, let’s think about this. Every day I go to my mailbox (the one standing out on the street in front of my house). Some days I pullout bills for services or products I’ve contracted with someone to receive. Some days, I pullout magazines I’ve specifically ordered to read.

Most days, I pullout unsolicited mail and make a determination as to whether I want to take the time to look at it further, or merely trash it. Whether it’s coupon books or “Have you seen me?” cards or Orvis Clothing magazines or (everyone’s favorite) a solicitation to contribute money to some political candidate or committee.

I didn’t ask for these things but bulk marketers all over the country are collecting data on me and people that live in my neighborhood and their demographics and so on and selling these mailing lists to anyone wishing to buy them. And, these things stuff my mailbox and trashcans full every week.

So, of course, my question is, why no calling for a ban on snail-mail spam? Why isn’t that just as annoying (if not more so since more energy is expended in cutting down a tree and making paper to print this stuff on than pressing the SEND button to 100,000 recipients)? Because it’s free speech and, therefore, protected speech.

This is a capitalistic society and people are free to attempt to communicate with you to sell you their goods and services, right? E-mail is just another vehicle to get a service in front of you.

”If Spam Laws Were In Place Two Years Ago, Where Would The Vine Be Today?”

This is a legitimate question. When I was building the Political Vine e-mail list, I snatched lists from a lot of e-mails that were sent to me in non-BCC format (the ones that had a bunch of e-mails in the header before the meat of the e-mail was read). I then added the e-mail addresses to the master list and sent out “unsolicited news stories.” Would this be spam under any law proposed? I gave (and will continue to give) recipients the choice to “opt-out” of the list. Am I still a serial spammer who is violating some moral law by sending out un-asked for e-mail rumors?

Now, in reality, the true spammers operate in the nether recesses of the Internet and cloak their e-mail sources. I have no idea how to do that, nor would I care to. But, how would such a law be enforced? You would have to change the ENTIRE structure of the Internet in order to track down the illegal spammers. Because the Web, to a large part, has been so successful due to the mere anonymity of it.

Point of fact, there is a Georgia state senator who is (or was, until I had a chat with him) intending on trying to introduce an “anti-spam” bill. His concept was to prevent anyone living here in Georgia from receiving spam. And, thus, the real problem would then become, “where is here?”

If you are on AOL, your e-mail box is sitting in Vienna, Virginia because that’s where the AOL servers are. Whose jurisdiction does it become if I send an unsolicited e-mail of the Political Vine through the AOL server to an address of someone who physically lives in Georgia? And, what if one person thinks the Vine is great and is grateful for having received it (yes, I know there are some of you out there who latched onto the list that way) and another person despises it and wants me arrested for daring to send it to them?

(A slight digression: This reminds me of the problem male office workers had in the 1990s with trying to figure out if it was sexual harassment to compliment a woman on whether her shoes matched her purse. Some women liked it and some women would scream “STALKING!” (No, not really. It wasn’t me.) And, the poor guy would get called to some Human Resources Office to get “feminized” on women’s feelings.)

Of course, with techniques like “masking” e-mail headers, it would be conceivable for someone to “mask” the Political Vine’s address (PoliticalVine@aol.com) and falsely implicate me in the mail send. If accused by Attorney General Thurbert Baker of sending such an e-mail, I’d have to subpoena the AOL mail servers in Vienna, Virginia for proof that it wasn’t me.

What About That Recent FCC Law That Allows Me To Put My Phone Number On A "No Call" List?

The difference between forbidding someone from ever bugging you during dinner with a phone solicitation and sending you unasked-for e-mail comes down to two things: 1) technology, and 2) the vast anonymity of the Internet.

The technology difference is that your telephone wire is hard-wired to your physical door (i.e., a connection to a physical piece of property). Your e-mail address is not. Again, we have the issue of "where is here" with finding a physical location for your e-mail address.

The main problem is the "vast anonymity" of the Internet. If you really want to eliminate all unsolicited e-mails, you would have to change the Internet so that every time you registered for an e-mail address, you had to provide a real name and a real address, and maybe a real ID number that you've registered somewhere. Then, it would be a simple matter of putting your name on a big universal "don't send" list, and every time you switched e-mail addresses, the "don't solicit" list would keep up with you. Otherwise, the technical overhead would be monstrous in keeping-up with the e-mail address changes. Talk about a fruitless endeavor.

From personal experience I have with manually managing the Political Vine's e-mail list for 2.5 years, I estimate there to be a 30-45% turnover rate in e-mail addresses. This means that, on average during a year, 30-45% of the people on the Web change their e-mail address. This could be due to changing to a better ISP deal or a better "freebie" like Hotmail or Yahoo!

I don't believe there is that much turnover in phone numbers. People don't change their phone numbers that much due to the cost and hassle of doing so. There is hardly any cost in changing an e-mail address for the average user of the Internet.


”So, You’re Receiving Spam. Whose Fault Is That?”

And, why are you receiving those “Hot Sex” e-mails? Because you or someone else went to a sex-oriented Website or you participated in a sex-oriented discussion or something like this. Don’t lie, or, rather, don’t lie to your spouse or mother about it. You did it once, just to check it out. And, oops! You deposited a cookie there that gave away your e-mail address to a collector of such e-mail addresses.

I know this is how you received these e-mails because my parents DON’T get this stuff spammed to them. They don’t hangout in chat rooms. They don’t go to Yahoo! and type in “Jell-O Wrestling Leather Babes” on their lunch break and go exploring the links that are returned (you don’t, do you, Mom? Dad?).

I get tons of Spam. I use my AOL e-mail manager to sort the e-mail by source address and usually delete in bulk what is sent to me in bulk. Last week, I received an unsolicited offer to buy Norton SystemWorks for $39. I checked the Symantec Website (the maker of Norton) and they would charge me $89 for the same package. Yeah, it was spam originally, but all of a sudden, it’s something that interests me.

The fact is, there are companies out there building software products that pre-scan the e-mail and either kick it back out or throw it into a junk e-mail folder to be dealt with later by a human or automatically deleted. Corporate America is busy making things better for you. Your own Internet Service Provider will be installing e-mail filters to block such spam from invading their domain.

But, to legislatively ban the sending out of the unsolicited offer? C’mon! I hope I don’t hear any Republican voices in either the state or federal government bodies even thinking about doing such a thing.

And, hey, if there are any legislators out there who are really contemplating this idea to “ban spam” on any level, do make sure you first ban your incessant “Give me $10, $20, $25, etc. so-that-I-can-beat-back-the-onslaught-of-whatever” mails that stuff my snail mailbox every political campaign season. The paper recycler is running out of landfill space.

I accept my responsibility in “asking” for all of this Spam. In the 10 years I’ve been on the Web, I’ve been to a lot of sites and seen a lot of things. In the three years I’ve lived in my current house, I haven’t been too many places, but I still get spam in my snail-mailbox. Not the sex stuff, granted, but, it’s still junk mail. I deal with it. I am a responsible adult who doesn’t want the government to prohibit product or service manufacturers from sending me stuff they think I might be interested in.

The same concept has to apply to Internet e-mail. Yeah, it’s annoying, but do we always have to write laws to stop annoying things from happening to us? What a precedent that would set. “I’m going to ban your free speech because it’s annoying me.” Great idea. Really. Someone wake George Orwell up. We’re getting pretty close to his 1984 form of life in this society. He’ll want to see this.