This site assumes that there 22 million businesses in the US. According
to the SBA site they quote, "this number may overestimate the number of
firms, as one business may operate more than one taxable entity". With
only 300 million people, that seems a bit exaggerated. Even if 1 in 12
people operated a business, they wouldn't be able to send an email to
every person in the US on every day, certainly not on a 56K dialup, or
residential service line. The IRS reports that there were 5.7 million
firms with employees. The vast majority are 1 employee owner/operator
firms, with essentially residential internet service.
So, yes, as the site itself says, "this is a scare tactic". The site also
says:
"It's time to look at some conservative situations, and come up with
some reasonable numbers".
Conservative, resonable. Indeed!
--Dean
On Mon, 26 May 2003, Bill Sommerfeld 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.
I stumbled across this writeup recently:
http://www.clifto.com/7359.html
("7359" is the estimated number of messages/day/user if the average
mailbox were to get one message a month from 1% of US businesses).
- Bill