Additionally, some have mentioned web "spammers" (no such thing, in legal terms). Most of the ones I know tend to use.infos, which can still be had for around 80 cents a pop per year.
I am a registrar, and I get my.coms at 6 bucks a piece. I could get them cheaper, but I would have to do more volume. Maybe someday. I sell my.coms at a much lower margin than a lot of the big registrars. It's pretty common to find $9.99 per year.coms, but I sell them for between 6.70-7.50. Depends on the time of year or if I'm having a sale. Also we do volume discounts with our larger customers (usually resellers).
Raising the cost of domains won't fight web "spam". Mostly the trend right now is to use parasite hosting (e.g. free, someone else's domain, free blogs etc) and leach off their authority. The answer begins with Google really. It's in Google's best interest to keep *some* web spam around, as it tends to make the company an awful lot of money (Made For Adsense pages are semi-legitimate, as they are still taking the surfer to what he or she wants to find, and up until just recently, they've made Google an absolute mountain of money).
Sure, and it happens all the time. The one difficulty in actually suing or otherwise taking up legal action against the affiliates is that mostly (and I don't mean categorically, by any stretch) they are located in Eastern Europe, the Philippines, or countless other jurisdictions where enforcement of international laws governing spam is shaky at best.
Perhaps we could penalize the companies for accepting affiliates from these territories, but the difficulty in that is that many of these guys have legitimate businesses established stateside through a front. I know this because I've been approached many times to help set up PO Boxes, bank accounts, DBAs (Doing Business As), etc.
There's a very simple reason you can't sue the companies who advertise via spam. They are not the ones sending you spam. Most email spam you receive is the result of affiliates of these companies who get paid a commission to sell you their products. Most companies strictly forbid the use of non CAN-SPAM compliant marketing, but some allow it "off the record". The best you can do is send an email to the online pharmacy or mortgage company or retailer on the other end and let them know "xyz account" is using spam to promote their product. Best case, you will get said affiliate's account banned. Most likely though, even if that does happen, the spammer will have multiple other accounts set to other bank accounts and other PO Boxes, et al.
Ostensibly though, these companies have no hand in or knowledge of the promotion methods being used to sell their product, unless customers complain.
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Additionally, some have mentioned web "spammers" (no such thing, in legal terms). Most of the ones I know tend to use .infos, which can still be had for around 80 cents a pop per year.
I am a registrar, and I get my .coms at 6 bucks a piece. I could get them cheaper, but I would have to do more volume. Maybe someday. I sell my .coms at a much lower margin than a lot of the big registrars. It's pretty common to find $9.99 per year .coms, but I sell them for between 6.70-7.50. Depends on the time of year or if I'm having a sale. Also we do volume discounts with our larger customers (usually resellers).
Raising the cost of domains won't fight web "spam". Mostly the trend right now is to use parasite hosting (e.g. free, someone else's domain, free blogs etc) and leach off their authority. The answer begins with Google really. It's in Google's best interest to keep *some* web spam around, as it tends to make the company an awful lot of money (Made For Adsense pages are semi-legitimate, as they are still taking the surfer to what he or she wants to find, and up until just recently, they've made Google an absolute mountain of money).
Sure, and it happens all the time. The one difficulty in actually suing or otherwise taking up legal action against the affiliates is that mostly (and I don't mean categorically, by any stretch) they are located in Eastern Europe, the Philippines, or countless other jurisdictions where enforcement of international laws governing spam is shaky at best. Perhaps we could penalize the companies for accepting affiliates from these territories, but the difficulty in that is that many of these guys have legitimate businesses established stateside through a front. I know this because I've been approached many times to help set up PO Boxes, bank accounts, DBAs (Doing Business As), etc.
There's a very simple reason you can't sue the companies who advertise via spam. They are not the ones sending you spam. Most email spam you receive is the result of affiliates of these companies who get paid a commission to sell you their products. Most companies strictly forbid the use of non CAN-SPAM compliant marketing, but some allow it "off the record". The best you can do is send an email to the online pharmacy or mortgage company or retailer on the other end and let them know "xyz account" is using spam to promote their product. Best case, you will get said affiliate's account banned. Most likely though, even if that does happen, the spammer will have multiple other accounts set to other bank accounts and other PO Boxes, et al. Ostensibly though, these companies have no hand in or knowledge of the promotion methods being used to sell their product, unless customers complain.