Spam, the pollution of the internet
I just spent an hour removing Viagra-sales vandalism from a site I operate that used to, so to speak, not have doors, but will now have locks and require keys, all so that some jerks can make a little money.
Well, no, not a little money. If the internet is a superhighway, these guys are creating gridlock - without paying for gas or even the cars they drive! Spam costs practically nothing to send; all they need is some cheap software, a CD full of addresses (often advertised for around $49) and a free dial-up account. They send out millions of emails. If they only get a thousand responses on a $50 product - not hard to get when they're asking millions of people - they've made $50,000. Not bad for an afternoon's work.
Spam is what happens when environmental controls aren't good enough, when politicians don't understand technology and it outgrows legislation. Spammers constitute a vanishingly small percentage of the internet, but they consume far more than their share of its resources. Since the election fever caught us all, I haven't had time to manually go through my spam folder. I've let over 11,000 pieces pile up since November 21. I've only received around 500 legitimate mails over the same time.
Sending spam is even easier when a virus writer is involved. It's estimated that an unsecured new Windows computer will be infected with something within 20 minutes of being plugged into the internet (which is why I have a Mac and why my brother is very strict about what goes on his Windows computer). The chance is increasingly good that that infection will turn the computer into a blind pipeline to pump out more spam.
Even if you're not unknowingly abetting it, you still pay - your internet provider pays for the bandwidth to receive the spam, and the computers to process it. It has to pass those costs on to you. Then there is the cost of your time to go through the spam and throw it away. Junk mailers, whatever other sins they commit, actually subsidize the postal system; spammers only profit off everyone else's investment. They are constantly looking for new free online facilities to exploit: they shill on blogs and wikis and force people - people like me - to spend even more time removing and preventing their garbage.
In 2004, United States alone, that cost topped $10 billion dollars, and spam volume has doubled since then. Spam also far too often contains illegal and downright vile content; I have often received disgusting enough standard pornography and recently started receiving child pornography.
Like most environmental problems, spam requires an international solution. However, their abuse is obvious and all governments - except a few who profit explicitly by encouraging spammers to base there - would have a better virtual ecosystem by banding together to prevent it. An international agreement to make mass mailers bear the true cost of their advertisements could be a tiny stepping-stone toward co-operation on more vital issues.
For more information about the true costs of spam and the impact it has on you, please visit the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.