Spam Is Different

August 2002

(I wrote this partly for computer people, to explain why spam doesn't have to be protected as free speech, and partly for direct marketers, a few of whom aren't yet quite clear about the difference between email and other forms of advertising.)

Catalog companies send catalogs to potential new customers. Spammers do the same thing with email. What's the difference? Why is it ok to send unsolicited catalogs, and not ok to send unsolicited emails?

Some people say the difference with spam is that the cost of email is shared between the sender and the recipient. The problem with spam, this argument goes, is that it's like sending a letter postage due.

I don't think this is the real problem. If spammers did reimburse you the cost of the resources they used, would spam stop bothering you?

I think the reason spam is unethical is that it disrupts your life. There are many different ways of reaching you with a message, from printing it on a billboard you might see, to calling you on the phone. Email is among the most intrusive, perhaps second only to telemarketing. The problem is, email is also very cheap. So it's not only more intrusive than getting a catalog in the mail, but you also tend to get far more of it.

A lot of us depend on email now, and spam is a source of constant, annoying interruptions:

1. Catalogs are so expensive to print and mail that catalog companies don't send them indiscriminately. Spam is so cheap to send that there is pretty much no limit on the amount of it that you could get.

2. Catalogs sit in a heap of the day's mail till you go and sort through it. Spam arrives as an interruption, mixed in with your ongoing conversations, at random times all through the day. If you depend on email for your work, spam interrupts your work.

3. Catalogs are often pleasing-- carefully designed, expensively produced, often full of things you covet. Spams are cheap, sleazy messages offering things that you not only don't want, but often would prefer not to know existed.

Some forms of direct marketing are bearable or even pleasing, and are allowed to continue. Others, like junk faxes or telemarketing with recorded messages, cause such inconvenience to the recipient that they end up being banned.

Whatever the spammers may say about their free speech rights, free speech has always taken a back seat to freedom from unreasonable annoyance. Free speech doesn't give you the right to follow someone around, shouting at them. When it inconveniences people beyond a certain point, speech is no longer protected.

So if you are bothered by spam, you don't have to go looking for an economic argument to explain why it's wrong. The fact that it disrupts your life is enough. I know people who get hundreds of spams per day. At that point, without some kind of filtering software email becomes practically unusable.

I predict that as the volume of spam grows, there will be increasing legal and moral strictures against it. Already I think that most legitimate direct marketers realize that there is a difference between sending catalogs to potential new customers, and sending email.