Journal damn_registrars's Journal: Spam is an economic problem 1
Spam is an economic problem, and will be solved only with an economic solution.
I've talked about wrong solutions for spam before. The simple truth is that there is only one reason why spammers send out spam to begin with:
Money
Spammers make money sending out spam. As much as we like to think they do it because they are evil or because they hate us, they do it because it makes money for them. If there was no financial incentive to sending out spam, there would essentially be no spam.
Anti-spam laws are the wrong way to address the problem because as we've seen all laws have jurisdiction issues. Sure, the US laws have put a few spammers in prison, but it is only a drop in the bucket in terms of total spam volume. The spammers know as well (or better) than we do that there are plenty of countries with lax or inexistent anti-spam laws. If the US made spamming a capital offense, the spammers would just move their operations and our inboxes would still be flooded.
The solution to spamming is to remove the profit motive. This doesn't mean that we need to tax email; that would be pointless anyway since someone would find a way to spoof it, or they'd just send email from a country that wasn't taxing it. Rather, the profit motive needs to be removed from the spamvertised, which would trickle down to stop money from going to the spammer.
So how do we do this? It starts with recognizing the spamvertised domains. A very large portion of the spamvertised domains are the fly-by-night domains that are only open for a few weeks at most, and are then gone - if you have old spam you can verify this yourself. And indeed most of those domains are registered through a short list of domain registrars in tremendous bulk purchases.
Which means that for every spamvertised domain, two groups are making money
I've talked about wrong solutions for spam before. The simple truth is that there is only one reason why spammers send out spam to begin with:
Money
Spammers make money sending out spam. As much as we like to think they do it because they are evil or because they hate us, they do it because it makes money for them. If there was no financial incentive to sending out spam, there would essentially be no spam.
Anti-spam laws are the wrong way to address the problem because as we've seen all laws have jurisdiction issues. Sure, the US laws have put a few spammers in prison, but it is only a drop in the bucket in terms of total spam volume. The spammers know as well (or better) than we do that there are plenty of countries with lax or inexistent anti-spam laws. If the US made spamming a capital offense, the spammers would just move their operations and our inboxes would still be flooded.
The solution to spamming is to remove the profit motive. This doesn't mean that we need to tax email; that would be pointless anyway since someone would find a way to spoof it, or they'd just send email from a country that wasn't taxing it. Rather, the profit motive needs to be removed from the spamvertised, which would trickle down to stop money from going to the spammer.
So how do we do this? It starts with recognizing the spamvertised domains. A very large portion of the spamvertised domains are the fly-by-night domains that are only open for a few weeks at most, and are then gone - if you have old spam you can verify this yourself. And indeed most of those domains are registered through a short list of domain registrars in tremendous bulk purchases.
Which means that for every spamvertised domain, two groups are making money
- The spammer
- The registrar
We just need to go after these known, crooked, registrars.
Recent slashdot post on spam (Score:2)
The article speculates that the operators of HerbalKing simply passed on to associates the keys to the automated, 35,000-strong botnet, and the spam flow didn't miss a beat.
It is clear that even arresting spammers did not accomplish squat towards reducing spam volume. Of course we've known this for a while - you need to remove the profit motive or you'll just end up with more spammers when you arrest some of the current ones.
While the author liked to speculate that the spammers "passed on to associates the keys", I argued there isn't much incentive for spammers to cooperate (with each other). [slashdot.org]
Really, arres