Spam Should Not be Legislated

The United States should refrain from creating anti-spam legislation. That's right, spam should not be made illegal. Nobody in their right minds would deny that spam is a big problem, and getting worse every day. Spam is estimated to make up about 40-50 % of all email sent today, with that number climbing to 67 % on many companies ' servers (Kri03; Str03; Lem03). Servers get clogged with junk mail; IT operations are brought to a halt; untold amounts of band-width are consumed; countless man hours are wasted every day by sifting through email accounts. Yet the government should not do anything about this problem: spam lacks a clear and all-encompassing denition, spam laws could hamper free speech, the Internet is not an American institution, most spam is already illegal without more laws, regulation violates American laissez-faire (free market) prin-ciples, spam is fairly simple to stop by technical measures, and, nally, legislation is an ineffective measure against spam. 1 What is Spam? To legislate something, that something needs to be dened