Comment The difference: we bear the cost (Score 1) 238
There's one big difference between garden-variety censorship (which I agree, we must resist) and some kinds of anti-Spam laws: WE as recipients bear the cost of unsolicited commercial email as much as the sender. Our servers, our bandwidth, our memory suffers in order to accommodate messages that we did not request.
It's the same rationale that was used to support laws against "broadcast faxing" a decade ago. Unlike junk mail through the post office (where the sender bears the cost of printing and shipping, and all we do is read) junk faxes rely on the recipients' hardware and force them to bear the cost of printing. Both Spam and junk faxes have a small incremental cost to send, but impose costs on the people who receive them -- even when they don't want to pay it.
It's the same rationale that was used to support laws against "broadcast faxing" a decade ago. Unlike junk mail through the post office (where the sender bears the cost of printing and shipping, and all we do is read) junk faxes rely on the recipients' hardware and force them to bear the cost of printing. Both Spam and junk faxes have a small incremental cost to send, but impose costs on the people who receive them -- even when they don't want to pay it.
