Dear Congressman David Bonior:
I have contacted your office in the past regarding SPAM e-mail and have not heard back. Maybe SPAM is not a concern to you because you probably have other people that screen your e-mail. But SPAM e-mail is an import issue to everyone else. I now get 50 to 100 pieces of SPAM daily and I have never asked for any of it. It is time that Federal laws be passed and enforced to put a halt to spammers. You did it for fax machines, you can do it for e-mail.
The SPAMMERS will say you can not stop them expressing their free speech or what not. But it is not a simple matter of the right to free speech. No where in the constitution does it say that I have to make myself available to listen to one speaking. I have always had the choice to not read the paper, turn off my radio, TV, or leave a public place if I do not want to read or listen to someone or something. This is not the case with SPAM e-mail. It is in my face when I open my e-mail up. It follows me when I go on road trips and get my e-mail. I cannot filter all of the spam - too much still gets through my spam filters. Important mail often gets buried in with the spam and once in a while, I have deleted real e-mail because it looked like spam.
And more importantly, the SPAMMERS rights should not be such that their cause can use my connection to the internet, my e-mail server, my tape backups, my computer, my disk space, and my time - all free of charge.
To put SPAM in economic terms: SPAMMERS waste taxpayers time, resources, and money. We are talking big dollars here, I mean billions of dollars of waste... Let me demonstrate: I get at least 50 pieces of SPAM a day. If I take just 6 seconds to decide if the e-mail is real or not, that's 5 minutes a day, 30 hours a year. At $10 per hour and my time is more than that, that's $300 per year. If only five million computer users in the United States get SPAMMED (and that's a big understatement) that amounts to 1.5 Billion dollars a year in wasted time. We haven't even touched the cost of wasted bandwidth, the cost of storing all this junk mail on e-mal servers, the cost of dealing with non-deliverable e-mail and the bandwidth it wastes, and the wasted time and space required by back up systems to safeguard e-mail servers and their content. If you factor in those costs, we are now looking at a multi-billion dollar problem.
What other issue today, costs the taxpayers (and businesses alike) so much in an unnecessary drain on our time and resources?
I propose that it is time for congress to act on this spam issue and act soon as the problem is going to continue to get worse.
You may ask but how can this be done? It is simple. Collect a SPAM excise tax! A tax of $0.01 per verified SPAM. It cost me at least $0.02 to view and delete spam mail, it is only fair that half of that cost be covered by the SPAMMER...
The alternative, is to empower the recipient the right to demand and receive payment for unauthorized use of the recipient's computer equipment. A $50 per day unauthorized usage fee would be reasonable.
If there was a central Federal ANTI-SPAM clearing house that was empowered to collect these fees, then the end-users could get the SPAMMER where it counts: in the pocket book. Even if I never saw a penny in compensation, the fact that I helped shutdown a SPAMMER would be compensation enough.
To do nothing about spam is not going to make this problem go away. Only an act by congress can solve this problem. Please do something soon.
Sincerely, David Barker
President
Electrosonics, Inc.
17150 15 Mile Road
Fraser, MI 48026CC: Senator Levin, Senator Stabenow