Internet Contamination as a Global Harm and a Social Problem

This position paper demonstrates that the global and cumulative cost of dealing with spam is at the level of some natural disasters. Internet email has been a very powerful new technology with enormous social and scientific benefits. However, Internet contamination has currently become a serious social problem. In particular, email spam is a significant irritant and personal stressor which impairs quality of life. Technology solutions, such as filtering tools, are useful but imperfect as they are either too tight or too loose and require their own daily management. Spam volume has impaired daily operations of individual computers and causes servers to crash. It also threatens data integrity as important messages are often filtered along with the unwanted ones. Excessive Internet usage already can threaten mental health and the huge growth of spam only threatens to make the problem intolerable in the very near future. Spam is driven by profit. Social solutions, such as collective action, are needed as spam is a global threat and needs to be prosecuted as a serious threat to security.