This weekend’s Times article on spam is worth a look, if only to discover that the Federal Trade Commission’s point person on the matter is named Orson Swindle. One of their conversations includes a decidely libertarian take on the matter from Release 1.0 editor Esther Dyson:
Spam is not just one thing. And I don’t want someone else to decide for me what spam is. One reason I don’t like regulatory solutions is that I get a lot of mail from strange places overseas that I wouldn’t want cut off. If something is fraudulent or illegal, the government should take care of that. I have always believed in markets because the incentives work.
Odd. If there is anything that shows where markets can fail, it’s spam. Pricing for email is currenly based on market rates, more or less, it’s just not based on individual emails, as Dyson would want. (She advocates something like a 1-900 call for every email that’s not anticipated by the receiver - which strikes me as detrimental to email’s benefits). It’s possible there are answers to the problem besides legislated regulation. Then again, I’d be perfectly happy with someone else deciding for me what spam is. My internet service provider already does in fact, just not as quickly or as thoroughly as I’d like.
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