What Can Be Done About Junk E-Mail?

• Author: Catlett, Jason

Legislation, economic disincentives, legal actions, and electronic screening are among the steps suggested to prevent marketers from tying up your computer's memory and wasting your time.

During the past few years, the popularization of the Internet, by lowering the cost of global communication to modest levels, is leading to a near-perfect market for information. It has bred enterprises that grow and change with astonishing speed, creating millionaires and invigorating the economy. The Net has brought to even impoverished libraries a wealth of resources at very low cost. It has enabled individuals to speak in forums small and large, with an ease and fluency that would delight the founders of this nation, if they could behold e-mail, the World Wide Web, Usenet, and online chat.

The tremendous good done by the popularization of the Internet has caused some problems, of course. Chief among these are a weakening of privacy, greater exposure for matters that most people would prefer were absent from society (such as hate speech and child pornography), and an increased risk of one's children (or oneself) being confronted by an image or text that better might have been left unseen. The Internet has brought the entire world into the living room, but some people 'are finding that there are certain parts of the world they would prefer not to have anywhere in their homes. An example that has become an everyday vexation for many is junk e-mail, also called unsolicited commercial e-mail or "spam." On a bad day, up to 30% of the e-mail processed by major Internet service providers (ISPs) is spam, much of it promoting sex sites and get-rich-quick schemes. Many people have had to abandon their e-mail accounts, as they become saturated with trash. Left unchecked, spam could spoil the great public good of the Internet.

This junk e-mail brings difficult and abstract political questions into a pressing domestic reality for millions of individuals. Is spam protected speech under the First Amendment? Should it be stopped? Given that the Internet is global, can it be stopped? If so, how? If not, will the marvelous medium of the Internet be overrun by automated solicitations for smut and scams?

Anyone with $50 to spend on some simple software and an Internet connection can spam thousands or even millions of people, most of whom hate these unsolicited pitches. This conflict of human interests comes down to the opposed claims of the sender and the receiver, claims so basic that, 50 years ago, they were adopted into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights--the right to privacy (Article 12) and the right to freedom of expression (Article 19). How can these conflicting rights be reconciled in cyberspace? The public appetite for novelty that technology has built and fed easily can mislead us into assuming that this situation is without precedent. In fact, the 20th century's history of junk communication through...