With spam making up roughly half of all-e-mails sent, the need to deal with it has taken on a new sense of urgency.

In a survey conducted in October 2003, corporate e-mail security services provider MessageLabs found that it intercepted about 127.4 million spam from more than 252.3 million customer e-mail that it scanned. That accounts for 50.5% of e-mail as spam. Experts say the problem is getting worse. According to Ferris Research, it is expected that 80% of all email will be spam by 2004. Clearly, spam is the most significant challenge facing every information society.

Just as the unwanted intrusion into our homes created by telemarketing calls, the clogging of our Internet mailboxes by unwelcome spam message has become one of the biggest intrusions into our personal lives. We enjoy reading e-mail from friends or news about a sale at our favourite store. Today, though, our inboxes are filled with e-mail messages containing pornography, financial scams and dubious products.

The problems from spam go well beyond the nuisances it causes. Spam is creating significant costs for business and the community and, threatening the development of e-commerce. Not to mention the loss in productivity, Ferris Research estimated that businesses had mobilized over US$10 billion resources on anti-spam activities in 2003. And while e-mail offers a cheap and effective means of marketing new products and services, how to avoid the risk of being reported as spammers and banned from Internet service providers is now the number one problem for legitimate marketers.

From an economic perspective, spam is just another form of pollution - an activity that imposes costs on people without their permission. The usual way to address pollution problems is for the government to step in and raise costs. Not surprisingly, there is an increasing demand, both within Hong Kong and internationally, for some form of specific legislative measures with regard to spam. In the United States, for instance, about half of the states have introduced a variety of laws against spam. Japan and South Korea have also enacted respective legislation to address the problem in 2002.

As from enforcement experience from overseas, legislative and regulatory measures may not be, to date, the best solution to reduce spam given the difficulties in identifying spammers, the global nature of the Internet and lack of an international jurisdiction over the issue. But legislation is still a top choice for the government who intends to control the spam plague. This is because like many victims of dirty air and polluted water, spam recipients are powerless against polluters, especially in the place like Hong Kong where civil remedy is usually not so viable. Effective legal restrictions can raise the costs for spammers by making it easier to sue them, limit the sending of domestic spam and enhance user's rights. More importantly, it may also help facilitate agreements with other countries to manage spam in the long run.

Anti-spam legislation can do much to solve the spam problem, provided we have a clear understanding and widely accepted strategy on this problem. Spam is a complicated problem which does not fall neatly into any one category, but involve aspects of telecommunications, privacy and the general utility of the Internet as well as law enforcement and consumer protection. To deal with such critical and difficult issue, the government must start the debate now to consider a range of measures that may involve government, business, users and IT professionals. A good way of achieving that would be to hold a public inquiry, with professional input from local and overseas experts.

SIN CHUNG KAI

[ComputerWorld, 01 December, 2004]