Cost Shifting: Sending bulk email is very very cheap. With a 28.8 dial up connection and a PC, a spammer can send about thousands of messages per hour. But since every person receiving the spam must bear the cost of dealing with spam the cost incurred by the recipient is greater than the cost incurred by the sender. Though some junk emailers may say, “Just hit the Delete key!” the problem surmounts to more than a person just deleting a couple of mails. In Internet, the word “time” has several meanings and is not just the hourly rate at which people are billed. It may include the load on the processor for the ISP’s servers. ”CPU Time” is very precious since processor performance is a critical issue for the ISPs. If the CPUs are tied up while processing spam, it creates a drag on all the mail in the queue whether they are wanted or not. Filtering cannot be adopted as a strategy for filtering spam by the ISPs since they consume a lot amount of time. Bandwidth costs are a major portion of small and mid size ISPs and is a major reason why ISPs have a low margin of profit. But when an external entity starts to use the ISP’s abndwidth, the ISP has a limited number of choices
- Allowing the customer cope with slower rates
- Bear the cost of increasing bandwidth or
- Raise rates
“Time” also coupled with volume, makes up for some interesting problems. Recent comments made public by AOL stand as a usual point of reference: of the estimated 30 million email messages per day, about 30% were unsolicited commercial email (UCE). With such huge amounts of data, it is a burden for the ISP to store and process that amount of data. Such huge volumes may contribute to the access, speed, and reliabilty problems experienced with a lot of ISPs. If large outfits like Netcom and AOL have trouble coping with the flood, its a pity that small IPS are dying under the crush of spam.
Fraud: Since many of the recipients of the junk email (around 95%) prefer not to receive it, the junk emailers have clever tricks up their sleeve to woo the recipients to open their messages. Tricks such as changing the header in the subject line, may look anything other than an advertisement. Another trick is to relay their mail messages off the mail server of an innocent third party. This tactic has a two-fold effect: both the relay system and the innocent mail victim are flooded with junk messages. Another trick the spammers use is to forge the headers of messages, making it look like as if the message originated elsewhere.
Waste of other’s resources: When a spammer sends out messages it is carried by numerous other systems in its way and there is no justification for the additional load these systems have to bear for the extra payload of the advertisement.
Spammers adopt very fraudulent and tortious techniques to avoid being held responsible in the court. Though large companies may afford to fight these cutting edge lawsuits, small “mom and pop “ ISPs are left to deal the flood of messages on their own.
Ronald Coase and his economic theory: He said that it would be particularly dangerous for a free market when an inefficient business (one that can’t bear the costs of its own activities) distributes its costs among a larger number of victims. It is because when millions of people suffer only a small amount of damage, it becomes more costly for the victims to go out and hire lawyers to recover their damages they suffered. Unless and until that population unites and fights back it will continue to bear those unnecessary and detrimental costs. This is what encourages the spammers to continue their dirty work.
In economic terms, this may be a prescription for disaster. Since when inefficiencies are allowed to continue, the free market would no longer continue at peak efficiency. As learnt in college Microeconomics, the “invisible hands” normally keep the market efficient and balance it, but inefficiencies tip everything out of balance. However, in the context of the Internet, these forces are no longer considered invisible but are actually visible. They can be seen when you have trouble accessing a web site, or when your email takes 3hrs to travel from AOL to Yahoo! Mail, or when a flood of spam crashes your ISP’s server.
CAUCE believes that stealing is stealing be it a penny or a dollar. Remember it is enough to only steal a penny from 4 million people to buy yourself a Mercedes Benz.
Displacement of Normal Email: In the late 1980s when fax machines were used to send messages, the concept of sending advertisements through these machines also came up and it became a difficult task to get the fax you were expecting since you had to go through a lot of junk before you got the right mail. Similarly now the spam that is received today is displacing the actual mail that is meant for us and has led to a tremendous amount of clutter in our inboxes.
