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If Acts of Congress meant anything, America would have gone metric in 1985 and our email inboxes would not be crammed with those unsolicited commercial messages known as spam.
Late last year, President George W. Bush signed the
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and
Marketing Act of 2003,
better known by its contrived
acronym as the CAN-SPAM Act. It took effect on Jan. 1, and
it was supposed to reduce the flow of Viagra offers,
enlargement methods, home-mortgage refinance solicitations
and diploma-mill proposals.
Since then, my spam volume has only increased. It used to comprise about 30 percent of my incoming e-mail, and now it has passed 90 percent; of the 183 emails that arrived last weekend, 169 were spam.
I don't know if there are any reliable statistics on a broader basis, but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that the barrage is growing.
In ways, spam is easier to handle now, despite the increased volume. I haven't installed a filter, but affordable high-speed internet service is finally available in Salida.
(For years, Qwest refused to offer DSL service here because our small market wasn't worth the investment. But after the cable company began offering broad-band service early this year, Qwest announced DSL for Salida. We weren't worth the investment when Qwest could have enjoyed an effective monopoly on high-speed service here, but we are worthwhile when Qwest has to share the market. Go figure. Anyway, I hope there will be enough competition to push rates down.)
In the days of dial-up, it seemed to take eons to download a bunch of spam that I was going to delete. Now it takes just seconds.
The spammers keep getting more clever. They used to try
to evade filters with deliberate misspelling, like
\/|@gRa.
The new trick is to format the message as a
failure to deliver
notice from an email server, with
an attachment that is supposedly the message you were
trying to send. It is, of course, an offer to refinance
your house or to provide a master's degree based on what
you already know.
Several years ago, I proposed a solution -- start charging for email. The idea was for ISPs (internet service providers) to collect a minimal fee, something like one mill, from customers for each email they sent. This fee wouldn't bother any normal user -- a mill is a tenth of a cent, so even if you sent 100 messages a day, it would cost only $3 a month. But it might be enough to deter people who send 100,000 messages a day, and the proceeds could go to some worthy cause, like paying off the national debt.
Judging by the reaction to that, I might as well have proposed taxing the air. People complained that it was an infringment on free speech, although it seems to me that attempting to fill my computer's hard disk with junk is a form of trespassing, not speech.
So here's another proposed solution, one that is voluntary all the way around. It could be implemented by a public agency, like the U.S. Postal Service, or a private company with technological expertise, like Google or Yahoo.
Basically, you'd set up an account so that sending each
email would cost a nominal amount, like a penny, and you'd
buy e-stamps
in advance for your account, just as we
buy postal stamps now.
You could still send free email, of course, but everyone would know whether it was stamped or free. A recipient could set her email client to receive only stamped email, or all email, or for that matter, only unstamped email.
With stamped email, you'd know that the sender believed that the message was worth paying something to deliver. There would doubtless be some attempts at e-stamp forgery at first, but it should be a manageable problem.
As noted earlier, this would all be voluntary. No one would have to participate to send and receive email. However, the stamped email would enjoy greater credibility, and the response rate on unstamped spam should drop so low that the spammers would go into some other line of work, like selling aluminum siding or red, white and blue George W. Bush action-figure dolls.
So there's a simple market-based solution, and I'm willing to bet it would work better than any Act of Congress.
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