Slamming Spammers

Marketing, First Amendment Rights Cited; Ethical Responsibility Needed

Angela Gunn Consumer Reports WebWatch Web Ethics Columnist>

We talked last month about the value the Internet community places on effort. Net users understand that the work put toward building Web pages and participating in online discussions and so forth is worth something, and that such worth makes it unethical to steal other people's words or deface their sites. However, on behalf of the world's overflowing e-mail in boxes, I'd like to expand on that effort idea: The time Net users spend online is also worth something, and those who waste it do so at their ethical peril. Spammers, I'm looking at you.

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as bulk unsolicited e-mail (the technical description of what we call spam, though it should be mentioned here that the Hormel company has been perfectly delightful in not taking offense to the use of its potted-meat product's name for such things). Commercial spam first appeared in Usenet discussion groups on April 12, 1994. On that fateful day, 4,000 copies of an ad for a pair of Arizona green-card lawyers were posted to 8,000 or so discussion groups, all but drowning out the conversations. Almost overnight readers ended up wasting a great deal of time wading through off-topic "MAKE MONEY FA$T!," porn, and weight-loss-plan messages, and many discussions withered and died because people simply couldn't devote that kind of energy to the task. Usenet never died, but it became a sort of online byway, one that seemed even to experienced users like more trouble than it was worth.

E-mail didn't have to wait long before getting spam of its own. The first significant wave of e-mail spam to mailing lists came in December 1994, while the first spam to just random users (where the addresses have been harvested from various sources) was sent around July 1995. Over the years, the volume of spam has increased from annoying to troubling to, if the trend continues, debilitating. A survey undertaken by the Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email, Australia, an international grassroots advocacy group, indicates a jaw-dropping six-fold rise in the rate of spam received between 2000 and 2001, and early statistics indicate that it's not slowing down.

Internet service providers are groaning under the load, since spammers not only litter users' mailboxes but, on occasion, use a respectable Internet service provider's (ISP) mailing information to disguise their messages' origin from spam-filtering software. Some state governments, such as Washington and Maryland, are revving up to prosecute spammers pestering their citizenry. More legislation, better filtering technology — they're all on the way, but one wonders if it'll be in time to save e-mail from… well, probably not Usenet-level obscurity, but certainly history teaches us that once a technology is more trouble than it's worth, it doesn't get used. And it only takes one or two "XXX Fun on the Farm" or "Teenage Nymphets" spams to convince a decent family that email doesn't have a place in their home.

The ethical problem with spam has generally been phrased in those terms: it's a problem as a theft of ISP services, or on the basis of the messages themselves. (Certainly a major subclass of spam — the scam spam, the most prominent example of which is the Nigerian money-laundering "offer" — has ethical problems in its very content.) Spammers argue that it's classist to protest spam, and that it's simply an inexpensive way for the average Joe to compete with big business on the Internet. Of course, those vocal spammers never explain why most spam seems to be for quack medicines, porn, and spam mailing lists — not the stock-in-trade of most average-Joe businesses I'm familiar with.

But we, with our sturdy ethical base, have a response: Spam is unethical because it wastes recipients' time without allowing them the opportunity of avoiding that waste. To use the First Amendment example of which many spammers are fond, it's not that anyone's dismissing their right to hand out their "Lose Weight While U Sleep!" information on the streets, but barging in my front door uninvited is inexcusable.

On a deeper (that is, classical) ethical level, spamming's unethical behavior simply because even if one spammer's a mere nuisance, if everyone spammed, the Net would blow apart like a featherbed full of M-80s. In other words, spam doesn't scale with the technology; if too much circulates it overwhelms the Net's infrastructure. Therefore, it's unethical for any spammer to operate, because there's no particular reason he or she ought to have more right to the Net's resources than the rest of us.

There's an argument that an exception should be made for political speech, since most democracies value the exchange of such speech enough to make room for it in otherwise protected venues. For instance, Americans feel that hearing political speech is important enough that we regularly pre-empt expensive prime-time television programming for presidential debates, which are broadcast at no cost to the citizens or the candidates. The service providers — that is, the networks — may not like losing the revenue during that hour or so, but that's the price of doing business in a democracy. (And the frequency of political debates is not expanding sixfold annually, like spam; at that point the networks would be quite right to complain.)

Political speech is so important to us that we make way for it in terms of both time and money. Even then, a citizen can always turn the TV off, ignore the leaflet distributor, and otherwise refuse to engage in unwanted discourse. Spammers don't give us that option, commandeering both users' attention and service providers' resources without regard to the ecology of the Net at large.

That sense of entitlement makes them not only annoying or troubling; it makes them unethical.

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Gunn is the co-founder of, and former Internet ethics columnist for, Yahoo! Internet Life and is currently the technology editor for Time Out New York weekly magazine. She has written hundreds of articles for PC Magazine, MSNBC.com, The Industry Standard, Business 2.0, CNN.com, Seattle Weekly, LA Weekly, and other publications.