Doing Bad by Doing Good

I use a spam fil­ter for my email. The rea­son I do is that my email address has been the same since 1994, and my pre­vi­ous email addresses still for­ward to the new email address. Back in those pre-commercial Inter­net days, shar­ing one’s email address was no big deal. Actu­ally, it was encour­aged. Peo­ple were asso­ci­ated with a par­tic­u­lar email address in Usenet dis­cus­sions and email mail­ing lists, which rep­re­sented most of the water­ing holes on the Internet.

Unfor­tu­nately, as time went on, spam­mers appeared and then, those spam­mers started look­ing to Usenet when har­vest­ing email addresses. This quickly turned into a night­mare as users like myself were faced with few choices: aban­don email addresses that were used for a very long time, use spam fil­ter­ing, or learn to live with a mail­box where more mes­sages are spam than actual messages.

How­ever, I never con­sid­ered the darker side of the prob­lem. Appar­ently, a num­ber of spam fil­ters are start­ing to go beyond their orig­i­nal mis­sion an fil­ter legit­i­mate mes­sages. This is where it gets dif­fi­cult: I hate spam but I also hate sup­pres­sion of speech. By will­ingly let­ting an out­side party fil­ter my mail for me, I could be keep­ing mes­sages from myself.

This rep­re­sents an inter­est­ing conun­drum. How does one ensure that the spam-filters are hon­est? Maybe there needs to be an extra level of polic­ing in terms of keep­ing those fil­ters hon­est. But the prob­lem then becomes that if the fil­ters pub­lish how they fil­ter mail, the spam­mers will use the infor­ma­tion to sub­vert the fil­ter­ing. And thus things will get worse.

One option would be a com­mon agree­ment between providers to list the names, addresses, and tele­phone num­bers of spam­mer in a cen­tral data­base that would be open to all. In this sys­tem, infor­ma­tion about a spam­mer would be revealed. ISPs would openly pub­lish infor­ma­tion about a spam account (after all, every spam can be traced to an IP address, every IP address to a ser­vice provider, and some­how, every ser­vice provider can prob­a­bly find some link­age to a credit card or other pay­ment info for the ser­vice). The issue here begins, how­ever, when one is try­ing to send some­thing anony­mously (because, for exam­ple, they live in a coun­try with a repres­sive gov­ern­ment). The kind of track­ing I’m high­light­ing ends up being a bad solu­tion in those cases.

The next option is to fight at the source. Make it ille­gal to sell an email address. If you do so, and set up a high price (let’s say some­thing in the order of $100,000 per email address), you then crim­i­nal­ize the busi­ness of spam­ming. But the idea of a pol­icy on this also needs to have some teeth so it will need to be backed up with some indict­ments. I’m not sure of how this could be enforced (maybe a high price, as well as time in prison for sell­ing more than XXX num­ber of addresses). Another way to do this would be to tax the sale of an email address and the send­ing of unso­licited com­mer­cial email.

This might go to the core of what makes spam so tempt­ing. So far, spam­mers and their sup­port­ers have said that the rea­son they use spam is because it is much cheaper to do so than any other form of mar­ket­ing. Let’s make it so expen­sive that it no longer makes sense. Pro­ceed from the spam tax would go to improv­ing the net­work and pro­mot­ing its use, or research related to bet­ter enforce­ment of other Inter­net crimes (fraud, spam, etc…) It could be the begin­ning of some­thing great!