Spam: a stupefying supply without a demand
By any measure, the global statistics on spam email are staggering: with some 200 billion junk emails sent every day, they now constitute more than 90 per cent of all global email traffic. Isn’t this, though, just an irritating but inevitable fact of digital life? Not necessarily, argues Edward Gottesman in his lead Opinion piece for this month’s issue. Although it’s a controversial move—and one derided by many tech-savvy critics—Gottesman makes the case that a small tax on email would be both feasible and beneficial if organised through ISPs along the lines of existing billing plans for text messages and internet access. A much-needed remedy to the rampant abuse by an opportunistic minority of email as a medium, or an unworkable and discriminatory scheme? As ever, let us know your own thoughts below.
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Get the usps to provide email. They have the info to attach email addresses to real USA addresses. They can set up a system where you only deal with an email address if there is a real address shown with it. This would reduce spam and no tax would be needed. Who would not want an email address with the @usps.com ending?
This is an excellent idea. Let’s start tomorrow.
There’s a bonus as well: people will start to think again about what they are writing before churning out emails, especially those pointless one word emails.
Of course, low income people and small businesses who have come to depend on email as a means of communicating cheaply with the outside world will be the ones who suffer unfairly the most.
One of the dumbest ideas i’ve ever read.
I don’t get what brings someone to write an article on Prospect in order to share such a Stupid Idea!!!
Charging e-mails? why not going back to the 90’s and charging internet access on a kByte basis? Not only would your rule have no effect on spams (or maybe would those spams be sent from foreign location, the ones with the cheapest “web-taxes policy”), but it would simply bring us back to 10 to 15 years ago…. Regulating companies and providers on this issue is a complicated matter, but pretending to combat Spams by making e-mails costly is, as Rodrigo said, one of the dumbest idea we’ve ever read….
Yeah, let’s tax movement since many people travel without good reasons. Come on, this idea is dumb! Totally crap!
I think this proposal makes no sense. The reasons for this are:
1. It would be nearly impossible for an ISP to correctly identify the email traffic going through their network. Just using some kind of encryption, VPN, webmail or a foreign mail provider would make this unfeasible.
2. The internet is a very dynamic medium. When someone charges for something, people use another way of communicating.
3. Email is on its way out. It is very much an old person’s kind of thing. Instant messaging, blogs and social sites are a more modern alternative.
I think this article is the kind of rant people write when they are fed up with the spam they receive and don’t know what to do. The author might want to consider using Google mail to filter the spam and unsubscribing from any commercial mail. Using an email account in mailinator.com can also help.
Actually, the idea of making email cost something rather than nothing works to defeat spam provided that the cost is very small (so it makes no detectable difference to legitimate email users) but has an impact once you start sending thousands or millions of emails. The way to achieve this is to make email computationally expenses, not via an impossible to implement tax. And all email packages already have the technology: digital signatures. If your mail client simply refused all messages without digital signatures, then spammers would have to compute digital signatures for all messages. This takes computing power.
Suppose it takes 1/10 of second on a PC. Then when you send an email to your Gran, you don’t even notice it. But now, sending out 10,000 emails takes an additional 1000 seconds. Sending out a million (which is what you need to do to make money) now takes days. And once you recognise a spammers “key” which he needs to sign the mail, you can simply ignore all mail with that key. I suppose if spam were really profitable, the spammers would just go out an buy some more PCs, but I think simply using the encryption/signing functionality that’s already in PCs would go a long way to cutting it down.
Ultimately, though, if you don’t want spam then you have to go somewhere where it doesn’t exist, like Skype, because email was designed to be open, thus putting limits on how easy it is to stop it.
This is perhaps one of the most technologically illiterate articles I have every come across. Whilst I would not question the capabilities of Edward Gottesman in his role as chairman of an international investment company, it is clear from the contents of the article that information technology is not one of his strong points.
Firstly, even if a tax per email sent were possible, there is the problem of jurisdiction. Large amount of spam is sent from countries such as China and other states whose leaders and legislatures have far greater priorities than regulating the handful of companies and individuals who are responsible for the vast majority of spam email. Unless every country were to agree to an international tax on email, spammers would simply migrate elsewhere. A similar migration to the East happened after Western countries legislated against spammers.
Secondly, with the increased volumes of spam over the past decade has emerged the increased sophistication of spam detection and filtering. It is incredibly rare now for a spam email to make it to my inbox, as my email provider (Google’s highly recommended Gmail) directs 99.9% of spam to the correct place (i.e. the bin). Emptying the spam folder takes one click, a fraction of a second and wastes no time or human resources. Thanks to the increasing ingenuity of software programmers, legitimate email will not become second class. As users become more tech-savvy and able to distinguish legitimate offers from (usually) fraudulent spam emails, it will be spam and the spammers that ultimately lose.
Thirdly, the article oversimplifies the problem of tracing the source of spam email. As I have stated above, spammers could simply migrate aboard to avoid an email tax in the country in which they operate. This is not, however, the biggest problem. Much spam is sent from computers infected with trojans, making up botnets (clusters of computers unknowingly acting as email/smtp servers). Given that this illegal activity is responsible for perhaps the majority of spam, it is not a problem that can be solved by taxation – you simply cannot identify the culprit. If only it were as simple as tracing the domain following the @. Unfortunately, this is childishly simple to spoof and the vast majority of spam is not sent from the domain as it appears in the email header. Rather, the best solution to beating spam is educating the average PC user of the importance of antivirus software and security patches.
Fourthly, it is not possible for ISPs to collect the tax in all circumstances. Most users use websites like Hotmail and Gmail to send their emails and as such they do not pass through their ISPs systems. ISPs could therefore not calculate the number of emails sent, or the tax owed. It would therefore be up to providers like Google and Microsoft to collect tax, which would mean literally hundreds of IT companies behaving like a government agency. What would be the consequences of non payment? Google-branded bailiffs turning up on ones doorstep? This is not a workable situation. Additionally, it is quite possible for a user to set up their own SMTP (outgoing mail) server and operate it themselves. Would these users be responsible for monitoring, collecting and collecting the amount of tax they owe?
As I have set out above, the proposals set out in Mr. Gottesman’s articles are not only an unfair and, as he admits, regressive step that will set back commutations progress by decades, they are simply unrealistic, unworkable and in many aspects not technologically feasible.
No point. The post-office protocol (POP3, the system that email is based on) will end and another protocol, along with supporting email client plugins (perhaps using the GOPHER: system) will take it’s place in a matter of months.
And if you tax that, the same will happen again.
The payments we make for broadband are to turn pre-existing communication cables into network adapters, that is it. And that’s all it will ever be pushed back to.
I sent the message below to Prospect’s letters address, but I thought I’d post it here as well. Matt Bradford’s comment above is excellent and knowledgeably explains several more problems with the idea.
It’s perhaps also worth noting that Gottesman’s suggested level for the tax is much too large. At one penny per message, the University of Cambridge (whose anti-spam systems I run) would pay £1 million per annum, which is more than ten times larger than our budget for email hardware and software.
Anyway, here’s my original letter…
Edward Gottesman fails to understand a crucial fact about the way spam
works. The vast majority is fraudulent not just in the services it
advertises, but also in the technical mechanisms used to send it. Mr
Gottesman suggests using the sender’s email address to identify who should
pay for sending the message, but in most spam this address is either
invalid or it belongs to an innocent third party.
It is possible to block about 90% of spam (the remaining 10% being about
the same as the volume of legitimate email) based solely on the identity
of the computer used to send it. Why not tax the owners of these
computers? Again, they are innocent third parties: they are typically home
computer users whose PCs have been infected with malicious software that
allows criminals to send commands across the internet to make the PC send
spam. The PC’s owner usually notices nothing, except perhaps worse
performance and reliability.
The real fix for spam is to go after the criminals that send it. Sadly,
when the UK’s national high-tech crime unit was swallowed up by the new
serious and organized crime agency in 2006, it seems that our police lost
interest in tackling spam.
This kind of argument comes up every now and then and its not only bunk, its the type of argument that would be used by those seeking to commodity internet traffic and to destroy the content agnosticism that provides the value the internet delivers in the first place.
I’ll just add my €0.02 which is the issue of network neutrality. The internet is an open medium, with access for all and unlike previous media, (TV/radio, print etc) it is by nature not subject to central control. This is its primary virtue and it is imperative that it is preserved. A tax would require (probably ISP’s) to actively discriminate between and charge for different types of traffic. It is a small step then for ISP’s to extract revenue from all kinds of content providers to prioritise their traffic and destroy network neutrality and providing an additional and probably costly barrier to entry for content providers. Now, ISP’s already filter traffic to some extent (legitimately or otherwise) but creating this type of market for priority access to people’s desktops would destroy the openness of the internet.
The problems of harvesting this tax are well expounded above, and ignoring also the technical problems which Tony Finch and Matt Bradford outline, But I will add that as soon as somebody devises a way to ‘catch’ emails, I promise you the next week, somebody will find a way to get around it, and start an expensive arms race that will not solve the problem (which can currently be very effectively addressed by using a good spam filter and not whoring your email credentials all over the internet).
-LG
@ Matt Bradford:
Just read the article in the magazine, had to come to the discussion to check that someone had pointed out the nonsense that this is from a technical perspective. Thanks for that.
I read all the comments on how stupid this idea is and although I may or may not agree with all of them I certainly think e-mail is a better alternative to hard mail. Based on the amount of physical junk mail I get in my real mailbox I think it a bigger problem then e-mails. At least with e-mails we don’t chop down trees or create garbage dumps. I am afraid if we tax e-mails we will increase the volume of “real” junk mail.
I think this is an interesting idea worth serious discussion. My only concern would be the probability that it would be another blow to the freedom of the internet and the incursion of more big government into the privacy of individuals.
As others have pointed out, due to technical illiteracy this idea falls at the first hurdle. Spammers succeed now due to their technical adeptness and to the complicity of a handful of countries that do not police their activities. How does a tax get around this?
Now, since I know absolutely nothing about investment but a bit about IT, I’m writing an article for Prospect about which technology companies to invest in. Hope it gets published.
Like many others I think this is a rotten, ill-thought-out, illiberal and absurd idea. Someone once said that the internet treats censorship as damage and routes round it. The same applies to attempts to impose charges and controls. I am already paying for my e-mail service, thank you. Spam is a problem, but market solutions are the long-term answer, not regulation, and, besides that, free open-source community solutions like adaptive spam filters have already provided a very good interim fix.
I think we should tax writers who publish unresearched technoilliterate articles such as this on the internet.
Why stop at spam? Let’s tax all advertising.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Before 5 years is out we’d find we’re paying 15c per email except corporations who will have mysteriously managed to wrangle themselves an exemption. Of course, to ensure compliance, each email will have had to have been tracked by the government (except again corporation mail due to trading confidentiality) and the contents examined for some banal reasoning. Not much good for a person like me trying to send a few hundred job applications per month though, is it?
Great idea! Let’s tax beards and windows too.
A tax on e-mail would kill off Hotmail, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, etc, who provide free e-mail accounts over the web.
A tax on e-mail would make e-mail discussion lists prohibitively expensive to run.
It would also make social websites such as Facebook more expensive to run. You can set up these websites automatically send you a notification e-mail when certain events occur. The cost of a tax on all these e-mails would be horrendous.
I suggest to give the Oscar of stupidity to this idiotic proposal that would result in 99% spam (sent untaxed through ISPs somewhere in hyperspace) and 1 % proper messages (sent duly taxed by common people for communication).
the idea might be good in theory, but its certainly not practicable cmon! there’d be a huge furore and the govt would be scurrying for cover!
from a business email point of view, spam is not the number one problem, as spam filters are good enough to keep out most of it. a bigger problem is “corporate spam” – a flood of internal communications. this problem arises for using emails for almost every information need in the company – working together on files, assigning and tracking tasks, having group discussions etc.
we recently did a white paper on managing this problem – http://www.hyperoffice.com/business-email-overload/
This is one of the most stupid ideas I have ever read. Whilst I perfectly accept that spam has grown out of control, charging per email is simply unworkable.
Email is an open standard, running through open servers all over the global. The “From” address is simply a piece of plain text at the top of the email:
From: Joe Bloggs
This is by no means non-repudiable, even using secure mail servers. There is nothing to stop me setting up a rogue mail server and dropping unpaid, spam messages into people’s inboxes.
The spam industry is already ‘clever’, using zombie bot-nets to send mail from infected Windows PCs around the world. It would take little effort to install the appropriate SMTP software on these compromised machines, remedying this effort totally useless.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (X) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we’ll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don’t care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don’t want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Most spam is sent by zombie computers. The most this silly idea could achieve is to bump it up to 100% of spam being sent by zombies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_computer
joh6nn -
How could you possibly justify leaving “This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it” unchecked.
Oh, for crying out loud! Seems as if SOMEBODY got himself a Blackberry and discovered that it fills up with SPAM. Well that’s just too bad.
The entire rest of the world has learned to deal with it by now, so why can’t you, Edward Gottesman?
Get yourself a decent email provider with adequate filtering and stop adding to the useless tripe we all have to weed through to get to the real news.
joh6nn has every objection right, in my humble opinion.
The only people who will end up getting taxed under this proposal will be legitimate users, since the spammers will find ways of circumventing the system (yet again).
Try again, nitwit.