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The solution to spam

A recent New Yorker piece suggested that there are more than 170,000,000,000 emails sent every day (tinyurl.com/ysgyow). Of these billions, most are spam: something between 100 billion and 150 billion spam messages are sent every single day. That means that if Bill Gates were to put everyone on earth online tomorrow, there would be spam enough for everyone.

What these figures show is that spam is not a technological problem; to treat it as such is to ensure that our defeat in the long war will go on forever and get steadily worse. Somehow, spamming has to be made unprofitable. In an ideal world it would be dangerous too, but danger alone might never be enough to stop spam. The death penalty for spammers could not be justified on purely utilitarian grounds.

What makes spamming so attractive to criminals is that the cost and dangers are borne entirely by the victims. These are mostly ISPs and partly their customers. Any better solution will still involve a cost to us. But we could hope to arrange the costs and benefits so that they encourage pro-social behaviour; at present they do the opposite.

Among the losers are poor people, for whom even 1¢ a message might be a notable cost. It is certain that some harmless granny whose computer was owned by a botnet would get a bill for $10,000 from Microsoft or Google or whichever after it sent out 1million Viagra spams one evening. But a few stories like that would inculcate a culture of computer hygiene more quickly than you could believe.

The choice, it seems to me, is not between free and paid-for email, or between an open and closed internet. It is between paying for inefficient means of combating spam, and more efficient ones. Shifting the balance of cost and risk would do a lot to eliminate the sorts of spam that are merely selling things very few people can ever buy. It wouldn’t do much about the more profitable, if less irritating, end of the business: stock scams and phishing attacks.

Phishing is perhaps the hardest of all these problems to deal with socially. It may well be sufficiently profitable that some would continue even if spam cost real money to send out. But the problem there, too, is social: the companies that phishers impersonate have spent years trying to seem friendly and easy to access electronically. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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