Can We Stop Spam?

Under-appreciated, but somehow everywhere. Cheap and easy to produce. Found in a can. (Your trash can of course) Spam! Not the delicious, meaty kind, but the variety that plagues your inbox. Over the years the internet has existed, spam has quickly jumped in become a simple fact of using email: you'll get spam, and possibly lots of it. It ranges from the Nigerian prince who wants to share his large fortune with you, to even messages about "great scholarship opportunities" - both of these I have received myself along with many other people. We seem to have figured out the perfect solution to this problem: throw it into a folder and forget about it. Ignore it. Out of sight, out of mind. However, Canada seems to have created their own solution: an anti-spam law. We've discussed spam as a disruptive behaviors in CMC - a behavior committed and achieved through and with the aid of computer communications - and I'll also be discussing cyberbullying and censorship in my coverage and analyzation of my article for this blog post.

This article discusses the changes Canada has seen as a result of the implementation of their anti-spam law. This law was created to protect Canadians while ensuring businesses can still continue competing in the global marketplace. (Source: x) An additional rule was added in January this year that made it illegal to install programs (i.e: Malware) onto someone's computer without their consent. The law went into effect last July after nine years of work. So far, the Canadian anti-spam legislation (CASL) has only concluded two investigations, one for a firm that was fined $1.1 million, and the other for a dating site that was only fined $48,000 due to their compliance. However, so far CASL has received 250,000 spam complaints. (A quarter of which are accounted to the firm.) Their hope is to deter damaging and deceptive emails and malware - not remove spam all together. (A task some would deem impossible.) While initial results seem to be positive, it is hard to tell what kind of impact it is making so far - time will tell.

Censorship on the internet has a long tradition of being incredibly difficult. Legislation that are passed are quickly destroyed or rewritten due to a number of reasons (violates first amendment, too hard to maintain, etc.). With the massive amounts of content on the internet, monitoring and enforcing restrictions seems unreasonable and unrealistic. I am impressed a law like this was able to pass and become implemented. This leads me to think of other questions, such as could a law like this work worldwide, or is it better to let spam as a behavior dwindle and die out over time? Can a method like this also work for other kinds of disruptive behaviors, or is it better to continue with the management and reporting system in place now? Questions like these are hypothetical, multi-faceted and difficult if not impossible to answer. You don't know unless you try it out. While individual person's actions are too hard to individually manage and persecute, it might be worth while to create a similar law for large scale operations. Regardless, censorship is an ongoing battle, but previsions and laws like these provide hope that a healthy censorship online can be achieved. The law itself is quite interesting, and definitely worth a good look over, and as for the question posed in the title of my post: We can't stop spam, we can just wait for it to slowly die out.