Spammer in the slammer
Bloggers know the prevalence of blog-spam in the last year. I would get a few a week then--now I get 25 or more per day, and the number is going up. It seems as if every new communication mechanism brought about by information technology carries the seeds of its own destruction in it. Because the transmission costs are free, it lowers the barrier of resistance broadcast advertising (spam). We saw it happen with Usenet, then email and now blogs.
Part of the problem is that the regulatory environment is nonexistent because commercial companies also want to spam us and would like to continue to do so. That makes the task of writing legislation that penalizes "bad spammers" while providing a clear legal playing field for the "good spammers" (ie; corporate marketing) a difficult, if not impossible one.
The best way to go about resolving spam is to require mandatory opt-in for all outreach, email or blog. I'd even go so far as to require all senders of bulk communication to register with the FTC and pay a small fee. This has to include non-profit and political fund-raising--two normally protected preserves.
Posted on January 16, 2007
