Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Why there is spam
Spamming is a lot like other types of industrial pollution. It happens because "legitimate" Internet companies make a calculated business decision that they can get away with tolerating it to some degree. Some tolerate a lot, others hardly any. They know there won't be any law enforcement. The main consequence of hosting spammers is some of their IP addresses will get listed in databases like the Spamhaus Block List. (There won't even be adverse publicity: the rare newspaper or trade journal story never holds the "legitimate" ISPs responsible.) Some just want to save the money an abuse desk staff would cost. Or they've laid off the technical staff that would have been able to block the outbound "port 25" route the bot-nets send through. Others are attracted to the high rates the big spammers are willing to pay. The twenty-something MBAs and uninformed, timid lawyers who influence these decisions can find plenty of justifications for tolerating spammers on their networks. Just as they can justify dumping toxic waste overseas, stinking feedlots, clearcut runoff, and any other pollution whose source is at all obscure.
In the early days of the crisis, spammers simply paid more for the same service than law-abiding customers would. It was understood the premium was a fee for the ISP to ignore some level of complaints. A few ISPs (AT&T and Paetec...) got caught putting this agreement in writing; we call that a pink contract. Pink is the color of Hormel's SPAM.
For all I know there are still pink contracts in Asia and eastern Europe, but I haven't heard a pink contract allegation against a North American ISP in years. Here in North America, the spammer simply buys much more service than he is actually going to use. He rents a whole rack in the data center to hold just one or two servers, or he orders a $5000/month T-3 connection when a $600/month T-1 or $100/month SDSL connection would easily handle the traffic he is going to generate. (He's not going to send spam through his own link, he's just going to host the target Web sites and control his bot-nets through it.) Salespeople for Internet services beyond the consumer retail level, it seems, work on commission. So the overspending by the spammer gives him an advocate inside the ISP who will fight hard to keep him connected despite the complaints, and despite the crimes he is committing which the ISP is an accessory to.
Spammers are a natural response to the ecological niche that tolerance creates. It's no more their "fault" than a dirty kitchen is the fault of the cockroaches that thrive there. The rationalization we hear from the hosting companies is almost always simple buck passing. It's always somebody else's fault, their "hands are tied," you're complaining to the wrong people, yadda yadda yadda.
In the early days of the crisis, spammers simply paid more for the same service than law-abiding customers would. It was understood the premium was a fee for the ISP to ignore some level of complaints. A few ISPs (AT&T and Paetec...) got caught putting this agreement in writing; we call that a pink contract. Pink is the color of Hormel's SPAM.
For all I know there are still pink contracts in Asia and eastern Europe, but I haven't heard a pink contract allegation against a North American ISP in years. Here in North America, the spammer simply buys much more service than he is actually going to use. He rents a whole rack in the data center to hold just one or two servers, or he orders a $5000/month T-3 connection when a $600/month T-1 or $100/month SDSL connection would easily handle the traffic he is going to generate. (He's not going to send spam through his own link, he's just going to host the target Web sites and control his bot-nets through it.) Salespeople for Internet services beyond the consumer retail level, it seems, work on commission. So the overspending by the spammer gives him an advocate inside the ISP who will fight hard to keep him connected despite the complaints, and despite the crimes he is committing which the ISP is an accessory to.
Spammers are a natural response to the ecological niche that tolerance creates. It's no more their "fault" than a dirty kitchen is the fault of the cockroaches that thrive there. The rationalization we hear from the hosting companies is almost always simple buck passing. It's always somebody else's fault, their "hands are tied," you're complaining to the wrong people, yadda yadda yadda.
