Re: Spamming (Good or Bad?)

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 5:16 AM 8/21/96, Paul S. Penrod wrote:
>On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Ross Wright wrote:

>> Market Droids????  As a salesman I take offence at this slur.

Sales droids are subservient to market droids...sort of like R2D2, a sales
droid, getting his marching orders from C3PO, a market droid.


>As for spamming, I get enough of it via snail-mail, I don't want to see
>it in my Inbox too. And, for the record, there are lots of people out
>there who pay on the bulk charge, not by time. Sending advertising or
>junk mail to these folks costs them money, maybe not much for the one
>message you sent, but several thousand over a month of a quarter add up
>to real money.
>
>There is a time and place for legitimate advertising. I am sure that
>given time and impetus, a number of clear channel venues will open up to
>allow precision marketing and sales to happen electronicly.
>
>At the moment, it's bad nettiquette...

The basic problem is that, unlike paper mail, it costs a sender essentially
nothing to send nearly any size file to as many people as he wishes. This
is the basic economic fact of the Net at this time. Until this eventually
changes, spamming will be with us.

(I understand experts in the field of "spamming" have various names for
various flavors: spam, velveeta, jerky, etc. I'll call them all "unwanted
messages.")

The problem is one of economics and allocation of costs. Other industries
have the same issues:

* fax machines: costs of paper are borne by receiver, leading to high bills
when "junk faxes" are received (and hence some laws restricting such faxes)

* cellular phones: receiver of calls usually is charged air time. Thus,
"junk calls" cost money.

(My physical mailbox probably gets about $1 a day of junk mail, in terms of
postage paid. More, in terms of costs to print catalogs, fliers, freebies,
etc. It takes me about 20 seconds, tops, to decide what to discard
immediately and what to save, so at this point "their costs" > "my costs.")

In my view, attempting to legislate what is "junk" and what is not junk is
misguided. (And I suspect it rarely works in halting junk mail.) Junk is in
the eye of the beholder.

There are technological fixes which I would favor over attempts to ban
unwanted messages.

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist         | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."