The Dark Side

The king is dead. Late last week, Robert Alan Soloway, one of the world's most prolific and infamous spammers, was arrested in Seattle. Soloway has been accused of masterminding the sending of 10s of millions of spam e-mails. He was a major persona non grata at Microsoft, and his arrest is being heralded as a blow in the war against spammers.

All of this, however, got me thinking about the nature of this medium in which we do business. The sad reality is that much of the internet is a garbage dump of junk content and a mire of spam. Most of the data being sent along this great network, one of the most liberating and democratizing inventions in history, is simply trash, and this despite legislative intervention by various governments. The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group reported last year that about 80% of the e-mail traffic in the mailboxes it was monitoring constituted some form of unwarranted or abusive communication. Less rigorous estimates put the amount of spam e-mails sent per day in the range of 100 billion. What's even more disconcerting is the fact that while the share of spam originating from American machines recedes, its place is being more than filled by the volume of spam now originating in the Orient.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. At a summit in Davos in 2004, Bill Gates famously pronounced the death of spam by 2006. This won't go down as his most clairvoyant utterance. Like Nietzsche, Gates is learning all too well that merely pronouncing something dead is no guarantee that it will go away.

What will become of the Internet? Not so long ago, the fear was that corporate merger and consolidation would create a hermetically-sealed network dominated by content monoliths. Now, the opposite is not so difficult to envision: a virtual wasteland, marauded by spammers, porn site kings, and content bootleggers, operating on the backbone of a few laissez-faire and craven ISPs.

So, for those of us whose businesses were conceived for an online world, what can be done to guard against this? It's simple. The challenge is to guard against content atrophy and misinformation. That is, always to emphasize quality over junk, and to ensure that whatever goes up on our sites signifies a genuine commitment to creating meaningful content. And if we spread ideas virally, then let them be good ideas, not merely empty messages, designed for brand propagation.

We are not powerless, though we may never redress the imbalance between junk and quality content on the internet. After all, even though Soloway might soon be behind bars, some other enterprising scammer will no doubt emerge to fill the vacuum. Long live the king.