FC: Reason's Nick Gillespie: "Why I love spam!"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 07:12:16 -0700
From: Mike Alissi <malissi () reason com>
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To: declan () well com
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Subject: Gillespie on spam
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Hi Declan,

Thought you would be interested in this

http://techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-061603A

Why I Love Spam
By Nick Gillespie 06/16/2003


Teutonic-style outrage over the infinitely exploding amount of spam -
unsolicited bulk emails - has officially replaced weapons of mass
destruction and even monkeypox as the leading threat to all that is good and
decent about life in these United States. "To protect the viability of
e-mail," writes Digital Impact's Hans Peter Brondmo in a representative,
overheated squib on the topic. "This plague must be eradicated." In The
Weekly Standard, the usually perceptive Christopher Caldwell argues that a
rising tide of spam means that "there is no chance that the Internet will
return to its old level of user-friendliness until lawmakers recognize that
the decision to leave it unregulated" was a big mistake.

In the current climate - which includes various pending and
sure-to-be-useless legislative fixes - isn't anyone brave enough to say
something good about spam? Well, I am. I love spam - and not only because I
just placed an order for a guaranteed system that will enlarge my penis so
that I can use it to clean my septic tank while playing solitaire with a
deck of Iraq's Most Wanted cards. (As long as I'm sharing, I should mention
that I only paid $59.99 for all this, using the same unsecured credit card
that allowed me to take advantage of Mr. Kwame Ashantee's generous and
urgent invitation to invest heavily in the Ghana Gold and Diamond Mining
Corporation. As a highly valued early investor, I also received 30 lbs. of
herbal Viagra and refinanced my mortgage at the absolute lowest rate of
negative 3.4 percent. Who said the Internet hasn't delivered the goods?)

Even as spam clogs my inbox the way the Atkins Diet is clogging colons all
over the country - I'd venture that as much as 90 percent of my email is
spam (and that's not even counting unsolicited messages from my staff) - I
remain thankful for the wonderful alternative universes that the junk opens
up for me. Who knew, for instance, that barnyard animals enjoyed such
interesting, if libertine, lifestyles? Charlotte's Web and even Animal Farm
never prepared us for the inter-species hijinks going down at cyberspace's
take on the Farmer in the Dell.

But what I really love about spam comes down to two large points quite
unrelated to bestiality, online gambling, and dozens of messages with
unreadable phrases such as "O?? o,?i >I?? ?u?i..." in the subject line.

First, in what is widely acknowledged to be an unprecedented age of rank
ideological bickering (unprecedented, that is, since the age immediately
preceding our current one), spam has managed to bring the right and the left
together in a way that even a terrorist attack on U.S. soil failed to. "Spam
Fight Unites Liberal, Conservatives" shouts a headline for an Associated
Press story detailing how Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has taken the
stunning step of teaming up with the Christian Coalition to choke spam -
especially porn-related spam - off the Internet. Take a look at their
respective agendas to get a sense of the distance between the two. The
Christian Coalition's is here and the senator's
here. As John White, a political scientist at Catholic University observed,
The Christian Coalition is "actually working with someone they disagree with
on 99 percent of all other issues, and who they would like to defeat when he
runs for re-election in 2004."

"I sort of had a brainstorm one night and said, `Why don't I reach out to
the Christian Coalition?'...I called the lady, and she was very
enthusiastic," Schumer told the AP. Thus came into being the most unlikely,
if unappealing, media coupling since Godzilla took up with the Smog Monster
some 30 years ago. That spam has prompted a "brainstorm" in a politician
whose previous legislative efforts have included attempts to regulate the
cereal industry is itself nothing short of amazing. But surely the fact that
spam has created not simply a dialogue but a partnership between these two
is a sign that the Age of Miracles is not yet over.

The second large point relates to the legislation that Schumer has
introduced, the Stop Pornography and Abusive Marketing (SPAM) Act. For those
of us who prefer decentralized, individualized fixes to overarching,
top-down ones, Schumer's bill, which is one of many similar bills floating
around Washington, D.C., helps to make our case. With certain exceptions
(read: exceptions for politically connected groups, such as members of the
Direct Marketing Association), the bill would require commercial emailers to
insert "ADV" in the subject line of their messages, create a national "Do
Not Spam" registry, and let people sue spammers for up to $1,000 per
offending email (talk about making spurious legal action even easier than it
is already). Schumer's bill would not only potentially outlaw anonymous
remailers - a service that is part of what makes the Internet the Internet -
it showcases how political solutions often miss their real mark. "Laws
should focus on what is the harmful thing that's being done," privacy
consultant Ray Everett-Church told CNET News' Declan McCullagh. "In the case
of spam, it's really a question of cost-shifting from the sender to the
recipient. If there were a law against shifting the cost of advertising onto
the recipients, then you could go after junk faxes, spam and (wireless)
spam."

Which means that Schumer's bill and others like it - not to mention the
nearly three dozen existing state laws - are not only misguided but likely
to be ineffective. Part of the reason is that, as Pacific Research
Institute's Sonia Arrison pointed out recently at TCS, "The problem with
relying on law is that American legislation can only be enforced on American
firms and much unsolicited email originates from outside the country." Even
within these borders, she continues, "The U.S. already has anti-fraud laws
that the Federal Trade Commission is frantically trying to enforce."

Another reason Schumer's SPAM Act would fail is that spam, like the
pornography it so often advertises, is in the eye of the beholder. Or, more
precisely, the nuisance level of spam is highly subjective and can only be
properly sorted out at the individual level. As The New York Times has
detailed, the vastly popular "Iraqi Most Wanted" card decks were almost
completely a function of spam-based marketing; clearly, the folks who bought
over 1 million decks in a matter of days didn't necessarily find that
particular piece of spam insulting.

That means that technology - including computer programs that are rapidly
improving in quality and the innovative micro-payment approach favored by
Arrison - that empowers the end user, rather than laws that seek to speak
for all of us, is far more likely to resolve the great spam crisis of June
2003.

Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of Reason, which was just named one of the
"50 Best Magazines" by the Chicago Tribune.




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