Spontaneous Disorder

National Review, July 28, 1997

Not long ago, a manager of a giant Texas-based company wanted to sell his boat. In the old days, he would have posted a notice and a snapshot on the bulletin board in the employee lounge. This being the Nineties, he e-mailed everyone in the company a description of his boat's features and attached, of course, a few full-color images of the boat. As a result, his company's e-mail network crashed.

Incidents like this occur because massive e-mailings, especially with high-quality graphics, employ more bandwidth than the network allows. The fact is that a 15-second transmission of a high-quality video on the web (the multimedia aspect of the Internet) takes as much bandwidth as it would take to transmit the text of War and Peace.

The boat-marketing disaster is an example of what is known as internal spamming. The etymology of this new verb, to spam, is unclear. Most experts say its namesake is the canned lunch meat. Others attribute it to the Monty Python routine about mindless offerings. In either case, spamming is the act of sending unsolicited, mass-distributed junk e-mail.

Spamming has arisen spontaneously as an outgrowth of the fact that transmission costs on the web have been reduced to almost zero. When spammers hit users with thousands of copies of the same message, havoc is wreaked. When massive e-mailing clogs users' incoming mail, the affected ones are not only the targeted users but also everyone else on their network. Frequent delays can cause deadlines to be missed, and businesses to go under.

Within an organization, abuse of technology is controllable by establishing explicit company policy and enforcing it with strict sanctions. However, on the web at large, there is no policy-making authority to establish the rules of the game.

Consider, also, what happens when spammers become spoofers. This is when an e-mail user takes on another user's name and e-mail address. Spammers do this to avoid receiving the angry responses of their victims. It is the innocent person whose identity has been usurped who will now receive all the bewildering hate mail. Spoofing is, in fact, the subject of a lawsuit filed on May 27 in Austin, Texas, which claims that Craig Nowak and C.N. Enterprise sent thousands of e-mails advertising free cash grants while using the plaintiff's name and e-mail address.

It does not take a dispute, however, for things to turn ugly on the Internet. Flaming--simple verbal abuse--has become strongly established in some Internet subcultures. If you think this would exclude lofty intellectuals, think again. A bunch of PhD candidates, all in the same discipline, were subscribed to a discussion list. No theme was given. Although the discussion began in a somewhat serious tone, one student guided it in a comical direction. Soon jokes became digs, digs became attacks, and the whole thing deteriorated into a Hobbesian world in which life is nasty and brutish, and tempers are short.

Did this experiment confirm Hobbes's pessimistic pronouncement about the nature of man? Certainly not. Man's social behavior is not static. It depends on ineffable rules of conduct which shape different types of social orders in particular ways. E-mail social orders are still new; the necessary rules have not yet evolved. Which does not answer the question: Should the Internet be regulated?

The most problematic area involves pornography. The Communications Decency Act (CDA) was conceived as a protective measure that would place the legal responsibility of policing children's access to sexually explicit material in the hands of the Internet businesses supplying it. However, even before the Decency Act was conceived, the Internet business community had already found ways to block access by children to what their parents deemed to be undesirable material. These mechanisms are still clumsy at best. The alternative government restriction, however, would have its own problems--we know that. Laws against selling cigarettes and alcohol to children do not stop children from buying them. Although on June 27 the Supreme Court ruled the CDA unconstitutional, other attempts are likely to be made with less restrictive statutes exactly to pass constitutional muster.

Two bills have been proposed to curtail the problem of spamming. Sen. Frank Murkowski (R., Alaska) introduced on May 27 a complex bill called The Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Choice Act of 1997, and Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) has proposed a simple amendment to the existing law pertaining to junk faxes. The problem is that legislation only addresses the symptoms; it does not cure the disease. The observance of rules of conduct is effective only when there is common agreement in a society.

The Internet business has the unique characteristic of having no resource monopoly power; hence, it poses no threat to users' choices and freedom. Any attempt to regulate the Internet market will harm both users and the Internet business community.

--GLORIA L. ZUNIGA

Miss Zuniga is a scholar at the Acton Institute.