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In (Sort Of) Defense of Spammers
CowboyRobot writes "Eric Allman of Sendmail has a rant in which he looks at the economic forces that have led to the spam problem: 'The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the spammers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as spammers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to spam. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.'" Otherwise known as the Willie Sutton principle.
Willie "The Actor" Sutton was a bank robber. His claim to fame is that someone asked him "Why do you rob banks?" and his answer was "Because that's where the money is."
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Yes, but you forgot an important factor. If the person is truly rational, they will use the following formula:
Expected Gain = (Gain from burglary) - [(Probability of being caught) * (Estimated monetary cost of penalty)] - (Opportunity Cost)
Opportunity cost is important - my opportunity cost is high, for example, since the next best option for me is my current job, which pays well, has health beenfits, etc. For someone with only a GED, though, it is significantly lower.
the estimated monetary cost being caught is a value assigned to the penalty (i.e., how much is it worth to me to stay out of jail).
Given that formula, a truly rational person will burgle whenever the Expected Gain is greter than 0.
Why do the above? It forces the spammer to house the mail instead of the recipient. If it is a spam, there's a good chance the sending site will be blacklisted before many of the recipients ever receive it.
Not perfect, but it changes the economic balance in the right direction without payment schemes.
This is something that's bothered me for a long time. If spam largely is fraudulent (direct ripoff) or advertising fraudulent products (real product, doesn't work), or even criminal (selling drugs illegally), why don't we ever hear about prosecutions for this?
Presumably the money trail is the easist thing to follow in a spam message, particularly with the scary new laws associated with money movement these days. It also seems that RICO statutes could be used to ensnare pretty much everyone involved as part of a corrupt enterprise. And then you go away for hard time, 10-20 and forfeit most of your assets to $100k+ fines.
Given that these laws are powerful and their penalties severe, it would seem that a couple of major RICO busts would put a serious dent in the overall spam business. It would not eliminate it completely, but serious jail time for some of the larger members as well as continuing prosecutions might make it much more scarce.
My own theory is that the government is loathe to prosecute fraud, simply because "aggressive marketing" is so entrenched in otherwise "legitimate" business. My tinfoil hat extension to this theory is that otherwise legitimate businesses are profiting immensely from spam (albeit at an arm's length), and have told FTC/FBI to go easy on it (naturally through their paid-up contributions to their favorite officials).
Although to this day, I'm still wondering why nobody seems to go to jail for selling bogus penis pills and Valium without a perscription.
His buildup is fine, but his conclusion is off by a mile and a half.
Firstly, he claims that our bandwidth and disk space aren't free... welp, he's right, but only barely. The marginal cost of the additional disk space, CPU cycles, bandwidth, etc is virtually zero, but certainly positive. Yet then he claims that a spammer's costs are zero. What about their computers? Email addresses? Bandwidth? Hard drive space? Those certainly aren't less costly than the same types of resources for each individual recipient.
But, more to the point -- why filters will make reduce spam by effecting the marketplace:
1. The filters have forced the spammers to degrade their own salespitch. By being forced to include extra characters, poor spelling, lousy grammar, etc in an effort to circumvent filters, they are serving to reduce their own credibility. By doing so, they are making their advertising less likely to attract any particular customer. Therefore, their response rate of the folks who might respond to spam is reduced, making spam less profitable.
2. By making spam filters more and more effective and easy to administer, they will find their way to more and more people's mail clients. For many of the new adoptees of filters, it won't be because the new users sought out the filter; it will be simply because the filter was part of the email program they happen to be using. Some of these folks are in the set of "spam-responders", that is, folks that might respond to spam. So, as filters proliferate, they will end up filtering spam away from potential customers -- again, reducing response rates and hence profitibility of spammers.
So, there's two ways where spam filters will reduce overall levels of spam by using the powers of economics against the spammer. Reduce the liklihood that somebody will respond to a spammed message by reducing it's quality, and reduce the liklihood that a potential customer will even see the email in the first place. Sure, the recipient will bear some costs in the short term, but the long term results will be less and less spam overall.
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