Avi writes:
Why is it that I don't get spammed on my fax machine?
Several reasons:
1. Sending faxes is much slower than sending e-mails.
2. Fax numbers are much harder to obtain by the millions than are e-mail
addresses.
3. Fax senders are easier to trace.
4. Sending faxes is much more expensive than sending e-mails, in most of the
world.
5. The cost of sending faxes increases with distance; e-mail costs the same
to send anywhere in the world.
6. Sending unsolicited faxes is illegal in some jurisdictions.
Most of these mechanisms cannot be applied to the Internet for technical or
practical reasons, but let's consider the possibilities:
1. We could slow the Internet down to fax speed. Probably not a realistic
option.
2. We could severely limit the availability of e-mail addresses. However,
this requires a lot of voluntary discipline on the part of Internet users,
and it involves inconvenience. I'm sure you've noticed that e-mail
addresses that never appear on USENET or on Web sites and are non-obvious
tend never to be spammed. Although I receive a lot of spam on a lot of
addresses, there are a few that never receive anything at all.
3. We could improve tracing capability. The one key difference between the
Internet and the telephone network in this respect is that IP numbers can
change quickly, whereas telephone numbers cannot. If everyone were required
to have a permanent connection to the Internet, this situation would change
dramatically, and it would have significant and beneficial consequences in
many other domains, too. Unfortunately, the infrastructure required to
provide fixed IP numbers to everyone is just not in place in most areas, and
there may not even be enough IP numbers to go around.
4. We could charge for sending e-mail. But every ISP in the world would
have to do this, and that seems unlikely. It also seems unlikely that any
effective inter-ISP billing could be developed, and even if it existed, it
would use far more bandwidth than the spam did to begin with.
5. Charging by distance would be even more of a nightmare than charging for
e-mail, and like charging for e-mail, it would seriously impair the
legitimate operation of the Internet. Neither (4) nor this option are very
realistic.
6. We can make the sending of spam illegal. But without the technical
changes above, that won't change very much.
I actually think that option (3) is by far the most promising. As long as
it is possible for people to dial into an ISP with a relatively anonymous IP
number, they can move and hide quickly. If they can be traced as easily as
telephone users, however, the situation changes. The only problem is that
99.9% of the world is not in a position to implement this, and we don't have
enough IP addresses to go around, anyway.