The presence of spam in the information environment brings about two concurrent events: a shifting sense of authorship, of text as intellectual property, and of artificial creativity, along with informational wars, waged over the global inboxes, using the arsenal of bots and filter scripts to combat each one another. While the positive side of spam's presence garners little more than amusement and tens of thousands of haiku using the word SPAM, the negative side of spam has produced a multibillion-dollar industry. In economic terms, spam is big business both for spammers violating fair use agreements to pollute systems with unsolicited, often bogus, ads and for those engaged in protecting individuals and businesses against this onslaught of unwanted correspondence. Some online pundits have questioned whether anyone involved in the fight against spam actually wants to win, as this would suddenly put an end to the anti-spam & anti-virus industries. In 2003, Bill Gates notoriously predicted that the problem of spam would be vanquished in two years. By his estimation, these problems can only exist as long as users enjoy free electronic mail services packaged with their Internet service provider accounts. Gates, and others, set forth proposals for fee-mail, emulating the Pennyblack postage stamp introduced by Rowland Hill, the famed British postal reformer, in 1840. However, resistance to this idea has been very strong indeed, often from businesses that use email to legitimately market products and obey the unsubscribe link protocols that were mandated when the CANSPAM act, passed by the United States as the first Federal Anti-Spam legislation on January 01, 2004, came into effect. Other user-end costs have been considered as well, some which use challenge the sender's computer to perform time-consuming calculations which on a one-off basis are not particularly significant, but would add up to hours of delay for a spammer sending millions of emails.

Why have these proposals not been accepted, when so many innovative measures have been put forth, using digital signatures, special codes, challenge-response mechanisms, fee-mail, and so on? The answer is no doubt rooted in the general anarchic democracy that typifies the web and has since its inception surrounded it in the aura of promise, progress, opportunity even though developed by the U.S. Department of Defense funded DARPA (precursor of ARPANET, itself the precursor of the Internet), yet created in the heady 1960s, largely by computer science graduate students at University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This rebellious, communal spirit of the popular computing ethos was epitomized in the creation of Internet protocols that used an open forum for dialogue about how such intermachine communications ought to take place. These were created under the heading RFCs, which stood for "request for comments" rather than military orders and commands (the command line was already written in!). This public spirit driving the interconnectedness of humans through digital technologies has remained to this day, and any attempt to impose outside regulations is hotly disputed and contested. In addition, it is generally recognized that whoever becomes the global electronic post-office holds not only an unjust monopoly, but also an ability to wield enormous power by control and censorship of electronic correspondences, a fear that is not ungrounded. Already email is some of the most easily intercepted of forms of personal correspondence because, in reaching its destination, email passes through many vulnerable relays ... Next page