Spam keeps cookin'--despite new laws

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Last paragraph in the article:

O'Neill noted that the European Union had taken an "opt in" approach, while the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly voted for an "opt out" mechanism. Warning of overly aggressive regulation, O'Neill said that "we want to preserve the right for legitimate business interests to use the Internet."

This is, of course, an indication of why legislative efforts to control spam have been entirely ineffective: a large number of mainstream advertisers, led by the DMA believe that UBE can be turned into a accepted marketing tool, if only
the swindlers, drug peddlars and pornographers could be banished. This is the DMA's current line and they have lots of clout in Washington.

There are several problems with this belief:

The reason why spam is unpopular has less to do with the character of spammers than it does with the fact that it's annoying to receive more unsolicited advertisements in your inbox than you get stuff you actually want. While spammers and their apologists like to claim that it's no different than paper junk mail or telephone soliciting, they tend to ignore the fact that paper junk mailers are paying substantial amounts of money to the postal service for the privilege of sending their advertisements (ie. they help subsidize first class letters) and even with an automated dialer, there are only so many people that a telephone solicitor can call in one day. The amount of spam that can be sent by an advertiser is almost unlimited, making it relatively easy for spammers to dominate one's inbox.

Mainstream advertisers have to contend with the fact that unsolicited mailings are far more likely to deter sales than they are to make them and cause problems with blacklisters and their own ISPs. On the other hand, the less savory types that currently dominate UBE, have little or nothing to lose; the response rates may be abysmal and they may offend far more people than they persuade, but enough people will respond to make the mailings profitable. In other words, the very swindlers that give UBE such a bad name in the minds of the DMA are the only ones who can profit from it; such will be the case unless the public can be persuaded to accept UBE as a legitimate advertising medium, and I see little chance of that.

Legitimate business interests, of course, use the Internet every day; just not in all of the ways some of them would like; Such is the nature of every medium. I'm quite sure a lot of advertisers would love to be able to send trucks with loudspeakers into the streets to promote their products too, but no sane munincipal government is going to allow it because it annoys their constituents too much, and even if they did, the public would not accept it. Such would be the case no matter how many Libertarian ideologues defended the practice as free speech. Eventually, when it's clear that the existing laws aren't working, there will be effective laws and spam too will be curbed, but probably not until a sizable number of incumbent politicians lose their jobs over it.

I take the whole article as an indication that the Bush Administration has no intention of actually enforcing CAN-SPAM; the President merely signed the act to give himself and Congressional Republicans some cover.

John L. Ries

Posted by: John L. Ries   Posted on: 02/18/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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