Laws needed to slam the rising tide of spam

BOSTON — Thus begins another day in the Internet cafe. I arrive at the office, decap my java, turn on the computer, and begin consuming the typical American breakfast: coffee and spam.

On my electronic plate I find the usual fare: An opportunity to lose weight while I sleep, a chance to get a lower mortgage, get out of debt, buy prescription drugs online, all while watching XXX-rated teenagers.

With the only utensil at hand — a plastic delete button — I pick at my food. Fifteen minutes, 138 deletes, one carpal and one tunnel later, I have been tricked into opening three spams and, probably, trashing as many real e-mails with "Hi" in the subject line. Good morning, Spamerica.

In case you didn't notice, this month marks the silver anniversary of that fateful moment in 1978 when a salesman at Digital Equipment Corp. typed out the first hundred unsolicited sales pitches one address at a time. Today, spam has become cheap, portable and as indigestible as its namesake.

As much as half of all e-mail is spam, clogging the central artery of the electronic communications body. AOL alone blocks up to 2.3 billion spams a day. One Internet service provider pays 12 percent to 15 percent of its gross revenues for anti-spam services. And anti-spammers figure that it's costing businesses $10 billion a year in time spent riding the delete button.

Indeed in the e-world, spam has now become the real four-letter word, called everything from "pollution" to "the organized crime of the Internet" to "the toxic sea." We've now officially arrived at a tipping point when even techies notorious for wanting the government to keep its hands off the Internet are calling for help.

In just the last few weeks, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo formed a joint assault on spam. Virginia passed a law that would send a spammer to the slammer. The Federal Trade Commission held a conference that bravely put the spammers and anti-spammers in the same room.

And now in Congress, Sen. Charles Schumer announced legislation to create a "do-not-spam" registry, while Rep. Zoe Lofgren wants a law to force labels on spammers and offer bounties to the e-vigilantes who track down the violators.

But in the midst of the cries to do "something," we are just beginning to decide how to label spam, let alone how to stop it. Most of us define spam the way Justice Potter Stewart defined its most important product, porn: We know it when we see it. The FTC figures that two-thirds of the unsolicited bulk e-mail is deceptive or fraudulent. But what about the other third? Is that spam or marketing?