Inevitably, the spam industry gave rise to an anti-spam
industry. According to a Radicati Group report titled
"Anti-virus, anti-spam, and content filtering market trends
2002-2006", anti-spam revenues were projected to exceed
$88 million in 2002 - and more than double by 2006. List
blockers, report and complaint generators, advocacy
groups, registers of known spammers, and spam filters all
proliferate. The Wall Street Journal reported in its June
25, 2002 issue about a resurgence of anti-spam startups
financed by eager venture capital.
ISPs are bent on preventing abuse - reported by victims -
by expunging the accounts of spammers. But the latter
simply switch ISPs or sign on with free services like
Hotmail and Yahoo! Barriers to entry are getting lower by
the day as the costs of hardware, software, and
communications plummet.
The use of e-mail and broadband connections by the
general population is spreading. Hundreds of thousands of
technologically-savvy operators have joined the market in
the last five years, as the dotcom bubble burst. Still, Steve
Linford of the UK-based Spamhaus.org insists that most
spam emanates from c. 80 large operators.
Now, according to Jupiter Media, ISPs and portals are
poised to begin to charge advertisers in a tier-based
system, replete with premium services. Writing back in
1998, Bill Gates described a solution also espoused by
Esther Dyson, chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
"As I first described in my book 'The Road Ahead' in
1995, I expect that eventually you'll be paid to read
unsolicited e-mail. You'll tell your e-mail program to
discard all unsolicited messages that don't offer an
amount of money that you'll choose. If you open a paid
message and discover it's from a long-lost friend or
somebody else who has a legitimate reason to contact
you, you'll be able to cancel the payment. Otherwise,
you'll be paid for your time".
Subscribers may not be appreciative of the joint ventures
between gatekeepers and inbox clutterers. Moreover,
dominant ISPs, such as AT&T and PSINet have
recurrently been accused of knowingly collaborating with
spammers. ISPs rely on the data traffic that spam
generates for their revenues in an ever-harsher business
environment.
The Financial Times and others described how WorldCom
refuses to ban the sale of spamware over its network,
claiming that it does not regulate content. When "pink"
(the color of canned spam) contracts came to light, the
implicated ISPs blame the whole affair on rogue
employees.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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