[WSIS CS-Plenary] Spam as an issue

[Milton Mueller]

Avri:
Your dissection of the spam problem several days ago was most welcome
and I regret that I did not have time to respond until now. 

You are absolutely correct that the "spam problem" can be broken down
into a number of technical, business, and national policy aspects, all
of which may act as substitutes for global governance. 

Two aspects of the problem were missing from your analysis, in my
opinion (see below). When these are considered, the relevance of spam as
a global governance problem increases, but your observations that
technical and business change may obviate the need for any global action
are still valid.

First, there is often a strong fraud/consumer protection/law
enforcement element to spam. This involves not only the promotion of
worthless and possibly illegal and harmful products but also phishing
schemes. 

Second, and directly related to the first, effective law enforcement
can be hampered by the nonterritorial nature of the Internet. As
crackdowns on spam in certain national jurisdictions increases, the
activity spreads to other jurisidctions. e.g., I have noticed recently a
huge increase in the amount of spam I get with Russian characters or
from the .ru domain. 

Now, you are absolutely correct that it is always an open question
whether the best, most efficient and effective responses to these
problems are client-side, ISP-based, technical, economic, some
combination of the two, or legislative, and if legislative, whether
national law and existing mechanisms of international law enforcement
cooperation are sufficient or whether new actions are needed.

A clear analysis of those tradeoffs and some conclusions about the
potentialities and limitations of global governance from the WGIG would
be a contribution. WGIG (and the UN) should avoid casually positioning
themselves as the "solution" to a very difficult problem simply in order
to promote their own importance. We need a clear-eyed and critical
analysis of the ability of international instityutions to do anything
constructive in this space, and an awareness of the risks as well.

--MM

Dr. Milton Mueller
Syracuse University School of Information Studies
http://www.digital-convergence.org
http://www.internetgovernance.org