May's Column By New Media Age Editor Mike Nutley
The past couple of weeks have seen an escalation in the war on spam. It began with AOL filing suits in Virginia seeking damages of $10m against five big spammers. Then AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced they were joining forces to develop ways of combating spam, an alliance unprecedented in Internet history. All of this has been widely reported, along with estimates that spam will account for between 40% and 45% of all email messages by the end of the year, and dire warnings that spam could bring about the end of email as a usable communication tool.
When confronted with such predictions, it’s tempting to file them with 19th century alarms about the depth of horse manure in London’s streets were the number of carriages to continue to grow. But it’s equally hard to see what the solution might be. AOL complained that taking similar action in the UK to its moves in Virginia would be difficult, due to the absence of appropriate laws. And even though such laws are due to come into force later this year, they will only apply within the EU, leaving spammers the simple option of relocating their servers and carrying on. Likewise solutions such as the creation by users of a white-list of addresses from which they are happy to receive mail have been criticised for removing much of the utility from email as a means of communication. Meanwhile technological solutions have simply led to an arms race between the spammers and the ISPs; each security measure that is introduced simply providing a challenge for the spammers to overcome. This technological approach forms the basis of the latest development, the suggestion by AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! that more powerful spam filters are being developed, but that consumers will have to pay for them. This, they hastily explained, would not mean the end of free email services such as Hotmail, just that users would have to pay for a premium, low-spam product.
Such a strategy might not be unwelcome in the Internet industry, not just because of its benefits for email providers and marketers, but also because it would remove one more free service from the Web and further change the mindset that things on the Internet are free. But any relief provided from spam is likely to be only temporary, lasting only until ways around the filtering technology are found. In this respect spam is exactly the same as many other problems bedevilling the Internet that centre around security. Companies and organisations addressing hacking and piracy face similar "arms race" issues while lobbying to change the laws.
Ultimately the problem may be solved by a completely new technology, just as London’s manure problem was. Until that time the best we can hope for is to impede the rise of spam. But it’s worth remembering that the motor car, while solving the manure problem at a stroke, brought with it its own problems of pollution. Nothing comes without a price."
Michael Nutley, Editor, New Media Age, http://www.nma.co.uk/