The cost of spam goes beyond annoyance By MARY DEIBEL Scripps Howard News Service May 12, 2000

- Computer executive John Brown says that unwanted e-mail known as spam cost his company $1,300 a month in wasted time, effort and disk space even before the I Love You spam bug bit last week, pushing up the expense of extra e-mail-proofing.

"This is time and money that could be spent in a more profitable way," says Brown, president of Internet service provider iHighway Inc., a 4-year-old Internet service provider in Albuquerque, N.M.

Most computer users have never put pencil to paper to figure what they pay for spam, a largely invisible expense that it isn't broken out on their monthly bills and is generally shrugged off as an inconvenience.

But Internet executive Michael Russina of regional Bell SBC says its customers in Texas and California alone are bearing the "significant expense" of almost $2 million in upgrades just to handle the massive increase.

For companies that don't provide Internet services but are simply flooded by spam, the cost of unwanted e-mail includes liability as well as lost productivity, Sunil Paul, chairman of anti-spam software firm Brightmail, told a Washington Spam Summit last week.

Spam's price tag is about to get new visibility, however:

_ "Spider" programs crawling across the World Wide Web collecting e-mail addresses have increased spam's ability to bombard computer users exponentially through data bases of tens of millions of addresses, all up for sale.

_ Spam has started showing up not only on PCs but on cell phones, pagers and other wireless communications devices for which the owner pays the tab. So customers will start to see the expense atop costs already folded into their monthly telephone or Internet service provider bill.

"The skewed economics of e-mail turn traditional notions of advertising on their head: In virtually no other advertising medium does the advertiser get to force the recipient to bear the cost," says Ray Everett-Church, chief privacy officer at AllAdvantage.com, a Hayward, Calif., computer data connection firm, and legal counsel for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail.

CAN-SPAM bills are moving in both houses of Congress to clamp down on spam abuse by requiring commercial e-mailers to use legitimate e-mail return addresses that let recipients have their names struck from spammers' lists.

To get at spammers who hide behind phony addresses, the legislation would let Internet service firms refuse to forward bulk e-mail they believe violates truth-in-e-mail laws and policies. Violators would be subject to court injunctions, civil suits and fines.

"Spam levies a tax on all Internet users: Not only do Internet service providers spend money and time filtering it and expanding their systems to handle it, but recipients have to spend hours weeding through it," said House sponsor Rep. Gary Miller, R-Calif., who sponsored California's anti-spam law as a member of the state Assembly.

Senate sponsor Conrad Burns, R-Mont., says Congress simply wants to combat abusive spam that has "allowed unscrupulous people to swamp Americans with the digital equivalent of junk mail."

House sponsor Heather Wilson, R-N.M., says Congress isn't trying to censor legitimate e-mail _ including commercial messages _ but merely giving consumers the same means to stop spam that they have to stop unwanted junk mail and telephone marketing.

First Amendment lawyer Alan Raul predicts the court will uphold a CAN-SPAM law written "to protect domestic privacy and spare individuals from unwanted communications at home."

So why is it called spam? According to Oxford University Press's "Twentieth Century Words," early netizens took the term from a Monty Python restaurant skit in which a waitress recites a menu of dishes all made with canned Spam and ends with "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, baked beans, Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam."

http://shns.scripps.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=CANSPAM-05-12-00&cat=AN

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), May 12, 2000