Imagine a world where spammers could be identified, prosecuted, and convicted reliably. The amount of economic energy unleashed would be staggering.
We are still in the early days of the internet. It is a frontier territory where crime is rampant.
We are still in the early days of the internet. It is a frontier territory where crime is rampant.
I don't want the government prosecuting people for speech, even mass, automated speech. There are much better solutions than resorting to violence.
Protocols and system designs which make abuse impractical and thus prevent spam before it starts are surely desirable, although they often come with their own tradeoffs (user friction, privacy, false positives, maintenance costs, etc.). If spammers can be deterred by improving along other axes all the better. But the general problem of spam is that computing resources allow for massive amplification of malicious actions, and that's never going away — it will be an arms race between spammers and their victims forever.
As someone who battles spam on the small business front lines, I hate it. It fills me with fear and a sense of loss-of-control, that spammers may be commandeering our systems at any moment, possibly causing us to lose money, time, and reputation, cutting us off from vital services.
It takes hard work for me to overcome that and to recognize the humanity of spammers. Even now, I'm wondering, "Is sneak a spammer?" Rationally I don't believe it, but that's the kind of resentment that builds when people are left unprotected.
I hate spam; I just hate violence more.
I don't consider solutions to problems that involve violence to be solutions. Violence is, after all, the last refuge of the incompetent.