Selling Your Attention to Spammers

Dotnaught writes "Can the free market stop spam where technology has failed? As described in InformationWeek, Professor Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston University School of Management has co-authored a soon-to-be-published paper that proposes an "attention bond" -- money put up by email senders that recipients collect only if they consider the message a waste of time. Supposedly, this market-based filter performs better than a perfect technology-based solution, with no false positives or negatives. A company called Vanquish already has a working model. Is selling one's attention the answer to spam?"

Comments

Can they really afford my time?

[Rude Turnip]

I bill triple digits per hour (but still less than a phone sex operator at $4.99/min). Doctors and lawyers charge even more. Unsolicted messages are an uncompensable waste of time and a theft of network resources.

Sounds dumb

[stratjakt]

Why is a spammer going to put up money when relaying through a zombie net or open relay is easy and free?

Should be a money-maker

[bigtallmofo]

What's to stop someone from signing up for every mailing list everywhere and setting up an automated application to flag it as spam so the money starts rolling in? Three or four thousand such flags per day, even at a few cents each should start to add up fairly quickly.

The problem with spam is weak enforcement

[Animats]

Spamhaus points out that 200 known spam operations are responsible for 80% of spam. They have names for most of the key people involved. Most of them are in the US, even though "bulletproof web hosting" services in China and money laundering in some tax haven may make them appear to be offshore.

The US Federal Trade Commission says that over 80% of spam involves some violation of Federal law. Not just the CAN-SPAM act, but mail fraud, false advertising, money laundering, computer crime, drug counterfeiting, and racketeering. There should be no problem filing charges.

If we had an FBI director who made this a priority, most spam could be eliminated in a year. Just divert some of the FBI Baltimore people who do child pornography, who are already experienced at tracking people on the Internet, off that job and onto tracking down the major spam operators.

In a sense, CAN-SPAM has been effective. Spamming by even vaguely legitimate companies is down. Almost all spamming now involves felony criminal activity of one kind or another.

Re:The problem with spam is weak enforcement

[SirSlud]

[sarcasm]In fact, I advocate taking anybody working on anything deemed less bad than child pornography and put them on it. In fact, we should not be working on anything except for child pornography. Actually, there are some dudes working on petty things like identity theft, corperate misdeeds, murders, grand theft auto, etc .... [/sarcasm]

why does the casual observer allow objectivity and reasonable thought to fall by the wayside when dealing with the very things that require them the most?

I was a sexual abuse victim when I was young, and I dont see whats so bad about the parent post. Child pornography department just fills in the vacant slot or two and the experts train the newbies. Thats how it should be done .. let the domain knowledge permeate the entire law enforcement departments that deal with online crime. You're not dismantling the original group, you're just letting them share some of their expertise with other departments that so clearly need them .. expertise they had no choice in gaining from working in such an important field.

There doesn't seem to be much motivation to put that kind of knowledge on spam enforcement, but I think the parent poster is right: why isn't there? Obviously spam isn't nearly as bad as child pornography, but judging by some of the porn sites they advertise via unsolicited spam, the industries certainly intertwine. Its not like a potential victim becomes a stupid slut who made her own decision to sell her body the second she goes from non-legal to legal age. I've seen enough stuff in my lifetime to know that claiming you're a consentual adult isn't exactly 100% true if somebody is pulling your strings.

Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem

[Caveman Og]

"...with no false positives or negatives"

Right.

People flag list traffic for which they subscribed as spam all the time. What is so special about putting up a financial bond that will cause people not to flag mail they requested in March as spam in May, or accidently marking mail from aunt Mildred as spam. I just don't see it.

This fails every test of an anti-spam proposal I can think of, including the most important: It doesn't stop spam.

--Og

Re:Automated Spam Response

[jmv]

Most importantly, you forgot:

"Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected"
Under this plan, I could just subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists and get paid (by mailing list admin) for declaring the emails as spam.