One justification is all the dollars that you get for hosting the email
accounts necessary to have 750K messages per day, and the fact that
whatever the costs and scalability issues (which while tricky, reduce your
costs), you are passing them on to the customer, who is still paying $1 or
$2 per month, and you are still making money at this rate. People pay $10
per month in _taxes_alone_ for their home phone. The cost of spam is
triffling. (actaully, Valdis is at a university, probably isn't directly
billing, but could, and others do).
Another justification is that the commercial mail houses all purchased T1+
network resources, and even small spammers purchased accounts from ISPs
which purchased fiber, and contributed a small amount directly to an
information economy that made all this possible. The sales made by these
spammers also generated tax revenue and jobs. Congress, and the FTC, and
the Courts favor business because money makes the economy move, and makes
all these things possible. It makes it possible for people to send their
kids to universities, which pay professors, and benefit the social fabric.
Anti-spammers have for years said that spammers are stealing something.
In general, this was never true. Spammers pay the same as everyone else.
One of the things that spammers said in 1998 was that spam saves trees. I
haven't heard this in a while, but I have no doubt they'll probably say it
again, and its probably true. Lots of big companies want to use spam to
make money, and/or reduce their costs. People own those companies. People
work for those companies. Government get lots of tax revenue from those
companies. Thats a pretty powerful justification.
Those of us who worked on the internet pre-commercialization can
understand a time when commercial activity was "immoral", and done outside
the internet. But that isn't the case anymore. You can't simply say
"commercial activity is immoral". But that time is past, and its never
going to come back. You can't get anywhere unless you understand what the
opponents can say about their activities, and react rationally,
reasonably, and responsibly.
The only real harm I can see, is that spam is annoying. But real, bonafide
commercial spammers are getting better at not sending me email if I ask
them not to. So it seems the annoyance is coming from somewhere else.
Somewhere that isn't commercial, and isn't commercial speech.
--Dean