Spam Cash

But an arms race like that is difficult to win. Other technological approaches, like a better authentication system, are under discussion. But another theory of fighting spam that shows promise is an economic one, and involves hitting spammers in their wallets. Judge agrees: "The overall goal here, when trying to solve the global spam problem, definitely hinges on reversing the profit model of spammers. We have to make so that it's no longer worth their time to send these spam messages."

A recent Discover Magazine article features an idea in the works at Microsoft called the "Penny Black Project". This model would force a person's computer to first perform a 10-second function before sending an email. That way, one computer could only send about 8,000 messages in a single day, seriously hampering spammers, who are otherwise able to send out millions per day from a single computer.

But perhaps playing the part of David to Bill Gates' Goliath is Marshall van Alstyne, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. He thinks it's possible to set up a system where spammers have to pay to send email while most everyone else does so for free.

image: ABC News

As van Alstyne explains, anyone sending you an email basically has to make this guarantee: "'I promise not to misuse the communication and I'm willing to commit to that promise by simply warrantying that the message is a legitimate communication. And I'm willing to warranty it in an amount that you, the recipient, specifies.' So it could be two cents, it could be a nickel, it could be a dollar. The advantage is, after the fact, the person who's read it can decide whether it was spam, and [if it was] then act to claim the warranty."

If it's a message you want, the fee can be waived and that sender can be added to a permanent "friends list." (This way your friends and family can send emails to you without any hurdles.) But if it's spam, you get to claim the money, which had to be guaranteed with a third party like your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or a credit card company.

"This way, legitimate mail has almost no incurred cost on it, but spammers certainly can't afford to do it," explains van Alstyne, who says he thinks the infrastructure to make this work already exists, but the system would require some extra software for email users to install.

But John Levine, chairman of the Anti-Spam Research Group, is skeptical. He says setting this up will cost more than people realize, because existing payment systems like PayPal are not set up for vast numbers of automated transactions. "[Paypal's] highly automated system is cheaper than manual credit cards, but each transaction requires logging in and working through a series of screens, both to be sure the transaction is the one I want, and for PayPal to minimize the risk of fraud," he explains. "Scaling that up wouldn't be either easy or cheap, and would require the investment of many billions of dollars."

Levine also worries that this approach could lead to new flavors of scams and fraud. "As soon as you make e-mail cost real money, you open up a wide range of financial frauds and scams, ranging from fake payments from fake banks to scams where the bad guys induce people to send them mail and collect all the payments," he says. "Although it would be possible to create a set of rules and tribunals to deal with the new problems, there's no reason to assume that the result would be any less expensive and awful than the situation now."

Still, making spammers pay may be the next weapon in the arsenal of inbox pollution combat. "We believe that at some point we will see a place where there is some desire to have emails that are paid to be sent, the same way we see paid-for advertising and other forms of media in television and radio and so forth," says Judge. "There are people that are willing to pay to have their message reach eyeballs, and that does have its place in the email system. We believe that we're a year or two from finding a place where it fits into the other efforts that are taking place."

Van Alstyne's work was presented at the FTC Bureau of Economics Seminar Series on June 10th, 2004, and is currently under review for publication in an economics journal. It was funded by a National Science Foundation STIET (Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions) grant.