Stopping Spam

There are few laws that cross national boundaries particularly when it comes to cyberspace. Indeed, there probably never will be an all-encompassing international system of rules and regulations that can cope with the net.

There are, of course, national laws aimed at blocking certain activities, and rightly so in some specific cases. Take email spam laws, they need to be in place, but at the moment they do very little to turn the tide of garbage pouring into our inboxes. Moreover, even though such laws exist they say nothing about that other source of spam – webspam in which organizations hoping to sell their wares online attempt to game the search engines, a process known as spamdexing.

There are thankfully no laws in place that prevent a search engine from filtering or blocking such webspam, although they struggle to maintain clean search engine results pages (SERPs) as black hat web designers and search engine optimizers devise increasingly devious methods to work around the algorithms and filters.

Equally, just as there are no laws against spamdexing and spam filtering, which one might consider is a form of censorship, when it comes to web cookies, there are no laws that say these are illegal, despite the privacy concerns of many users and activist groups alike. That said, most surveys suggest that the majority of users are either unaware of the existence of cookies or don’t mind them. Cookies are, in case you didn’t know, tiny files that websites leave on your hard drive when you visit their pages. They are usually used to load your passwords, but can track your route through the web back and forth between sites and so can be used in conjunction with spyware to monitor your net habits.

Paul Przemysław Polanski of the Department of European law, at Warsaw University, Poland, writing in the International Journal of Intellectual Property Management (2008, 2, 139-152) points out that e- commerce continues to evolve without a detailed set of laws on a global and regional level. “It is visible in the area of internet advertising,” he says, “which remains completely unregulated.” This is despite anti-spam laws, which when I look at my spam folders with their hundreds of gleaming offers for herbal V|@gra and an interesting beer supply

In the early days of the internet, sending commercial e-mails was unthinkable, adds Polanski. Then in 1994, law firm Canter and Siegel, Phoenix, Arizona, posted an immigration law advertisement on bulletin boards. The community reacted furiously and effectively blocked their e-mail account by sending thousands of e-mail messages. The law firm's account was soon revoked on the grounds that the company abused its privileges. But, the tide had turned. A spam was born.

Now, we have billions of spam emails crossing the intertubes, graphical spam becomes unfilterable, blogs are stuffed with spam comments, and despite their best efforts the search engines are increasingly plagued by spam websites, splogs, scrapers and link farms.

As long ago as 2003, the World Summit on the Information Society proclaimed:

Spam is a significant and growing problem for users, networks and the internet as a whole. Spam and cyber-security should be dealt with at appropriate national and international levels.

Has spam been sliced and diced since this proclamation? I think not.

Polanski recognizes that there are efforts underway to eradicate spam. “There are plenty of legal, technical and organizational efforts to remove spam,” he says, “These undertakings clearly signify the intention of the majority of users to block spam advertising that is generated by a very small fraction of the internet community. One can therefore argue that it is customary for online business to refrain from sending spam. It is a global customary obligation.”