Posted 8:59 AM

Spam and Vitriol

Interesting column in today's Mercury News by Eric Goldman, assistant professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, in which he maintains that Spam is just a byproduct of our media-saturated world.

Goldman asks, "The discourse level in the spam 'debate'' has reached a vitriolic low. The message is clear: People hate spam. But why? Why do people hate spam so much?" And this is, indeed, the meat of the argument. Its not that anyone outside of the spammers thinks that untargeted junk e-mail is a "good thing", but that there are so many wild-eyed anti-spam zealots who refuse to listen to any reasonable solution. You know the people I mean, the ones who claim that they should only receive e-mail from people they know. They apparently gloss over the fact that this makes it impossible for anyone to ever actually send an email, since no one comes into this world with an established electronic 'relationship'.

Its this level of vitriol which, more than anything else, makes solving the real spam problem so hard.