On Mon, 26 May 2003, Eric A. Hall wrote:
on 5/26/2003 3:58 PM Dean Anderson wrote:
You have yet to find any compelling grounds on which to limit real
commercial speech, and yet to even demonstrate any harms of real
commercial speech.
Spam on my measured-rate cellular-data PDA is real cost. Spam on my
measured-rate ISDN line (California) is real cost. Extra staffing to
counteract spam at my [isp|university|business] is real cost (setting
aside other costs that you seem willing to ignore). There are plenty of
examples to pick from.
Don't get email on measured rate services, then. Or don't publish the
email to measured rate services. Put your measured rate services on the
do-not-send list. There are many options besides banning commercial email.
These are abnormal expenses which go directly into maintaining the
usefulness of my property and which do not increase its value. The right
to commercial speech would not warrant these costs for any other venue,
and there is nothing sufficiently different and unique about this venue to
warrant it here.
These are not abnormal expenses. You have deal with abuse no matter what
the form. You have to have an abuse person. Persons intent on performing
abuse will abuse whatever is handy.
There are no costs to warrant. Spam cannot cost you more than $1 or $2
per month per user. It doesn't matter how many abuse administrators you
have, or how big and expensive your servers are. Email (including spam)
is too cheap to meter. It is practically free, per person. Sites that
have 10 million users are going to have larger expenses than sites that
have 10 users. That isn't a surprise, nor a compelling reason to ban spam.
You are certainly entitled to the opposite opinion but the existence of
previous laws for protection in other venues is evidence against you.
Perhaps you can provide an example of a law that acts as evidence in favor
of your opinion so we can see how this balances out.
Junk fax law, overturned as being unconstitutional restriction on speech.
Anyway, I think commercial speech including spam _could_ be regulated, but
there so far is no justification for doing so. I don't think there is any
chance whatsoever that spam will ever be banned completely, and if it
were, it would suffer the same fate as the Junk Fax law, which had much
more signficant costs (consumption of paper at 10 cents per page) and
significant definite harms (lost faxes due to being out of paper) than
spam ever will.
--Dean