Beyond The Net
How much does spam really cost?
By Janine Warner
Supporters of spam will tell you that e-mail is the most cost-effective way to market any product or service.
Opponents will tell you that spam is only cost-effective for the sender and that receiving those unsolicited messages is costing billions of dollars each year in computer processing power, online service fees and technical support.
If you suffer from an overloaded in-box, you probably agree that all the time you waste sorting through spam is the biggest price you pay. A new California law, proposed last month, could make it easier to recoup some of those costs by giving residents the right to sue spammers $500 for each unsolicited e-mail message.
California State Sen. Debra Bowen modeled the bill after a federal law that bans unsolicited faxes. So far there is no federal law against spam. Although several have been proposed in recent years, none have made it through the approval process.
The federal fax law makes it illegal to send unsolicited fax advertisements unless the recipient agrees in advance to receive them (a concept known as ``opt-in''). Both the federal fax law and the proposed California e-mail law make allowances for existing business relationships between the sender and recipient.
Like many states, California already has an opt-out law, which means spam must include an option that enables users to request they be removed from the sender's mailing list. But Bowen and many others argue that law has been ineffective and still leaves consumers sorting through countless new messages every day.
COSTS ADD UP
''Advertisers can't use your fax paper and toner to send you sales pitches, and they shouldn't be allowed to tie up your bandwidth, computer processing capacity, and hard-drive space to e-mail you ads you didn't ask for and don't want,'' Bowen said in a statement.
California is not the only state cracking down on spam. Today, 29 states have some kind of legislation about spam, most of them making it illegal to use false or misleading subject lines or to route spam through a third party's e-mail system. Colorado and Missouri have proposed laws to create a central database of residents who don't want to receive unsolicited e-mail that would be similar to those proposed for phone solicitors. Consumers could then sue marketers who spam them anyway, $10 per message in Colorado, $5,000 per message in Missouri.
So how much does spam cost? Or should I say, how much should it cost? $10, $500, $5,000? Most lawmakers set $5,000 at the high end because that's the maximum you can sue someone for in small claims court.
Of course, if you have a big enough case, you don't have to settle for small claims. Last October, a Virginia federal court awarded America Online nearly $7 million in damages against a company that was accused of sending a billion unsolicited e-mail messages to AOL users to promote adult websites. The amount of that settlement was announced recently, and AOL has filed more than 20 similar lawsuits against other spammers.
TECH TIME LOST
If you consider that many companies with employees connected to the Internet are receiving thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of spam messages a day, the cost to business can be significant and could lead to more lawsuits in the future. The technical staff in many big companies will tell you that spam costs them countless hours of tech-support time spent fixing systems that get overloaded by junk e-mail and installing and managing programs designed to block spam from company in-boxes.
A Harris Interactive poll ( www.harrisinteractive.com ) released last month found that 74 percent of online users surveyed would favor a law to make spam illegal. A separate study by the same group estimates the cost to U.S. businesses at $8.9 billion a year.
Florida has not yet enacted any spam legislation, although a Florida bar rule requires attorneys who advertise via unsolicited e-mail to put ''legal advertisement'' in the subject line.
Bowen hopes her California law will lead to a similar federal law in the future and encourages other states to pass legislation against spam. In an e-mail interview, Bowen posed this scenario and question:
``No salesman, even if he fronts for a rock band with an excellent name, has a First Amendment right to force The Miami Herald to run his ads in Dave Barry's column space. So why should that same salesman be allowed to take over people's computer hard drives and e-mail in-boxes by bombarding them with unsolicited ads?''
First publication, The Miami Herald, Mon, March 10, 2003
