Thursday, 08/29/02

Paul Graham, who wrote the Bayesian spam filtering article and sparked a lot of interest in the subject, is back with an op-ed of sorts: Spam is Different. In the preface he says, "I wrote this partly for computer people, to explain why spam doesn't have to be protected as free speech, and partly for direct marketers, a few of whom aren't yet quite clear about the difference between email and other forms of advertising."

In a nutshell, he's trying to explain why it's okay to make spam illegal (setting aside the logistical difficulties of prosecuting offenders beyond national borders).

Here's what he says early on:

Some people say the difference with spam is that the cost of email is shared between the sender and the recipient. The problem with spam, this argument goes, is that it's like sending a letter postage due.

I don't think this is the real problem. If spammers did reimburse you the cost of the resources they used, would spam stop bothering you?

After answering himself in the negative, here's what he says near the end:

What saves print catalogs, ironically, is their own cost. There are plenty of companies that would send a courier to interrupt you with an offer to refinance your mortgage if they could afford to. (The same ones that now send you spam.) But the response rate wouldn't justify the cost.

Ultimately, it's the low cost of spam that's the root of the problem.

In other words, if spammers did reimburse me for the cost of the resources they use, spam would stop bothering me -- not because I would personally receive adequate compensation, but because spammers couldn't afford to send spam.

There's no reason to resort to the spooky claim that spam is somehow a new class of unprotected speech, like obscenity, because the conventional economic argument that spam improperly consumes the receiver's resources gets the job done. This, not annoyance, is the predicate for banning unsolicited faxes.

I like Graham's point in the Bayes article about nomenclature. He argues successfully that classifying spam as "unsolicited commercial email" is insufficiently precise for several reasons, and makes a good case for using "unsolicited automated email" in its place. I bring this up because I previously thought UCE was a good technical definition of spam, and he convinced me otherwise.

His nomenclature argument undermines his legal argument -- if a politician mass-mailed "Vote for me!" messages to people in his district, that's bloody well protected speech, and it's also spam. We need a way to squash one without squashing the other. A legal method, whether it constricts the first amendment or is more narrowly targeted along the line of Washington State's spam laws, is never going to exhibit the finesse of a well-crafted technical method, like the one Graham himself popularized. 01:38PM «

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