Originally appeared in the Computer User

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ISPs are up in arms because spam is choking their causeways, and customers are mounting lawsuits against them. Users at Netcom forced that ISP to tighten its controls. America Online, no stranger to junk mail, has become a spam vigilante, posting bounties on the heads of the "Most Wanted Spammers" (http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/980305/america_on_1.html)

To hear direct marketers tell the tale, spam is good. It meets people's needs, and if people don't like it, a simple click makes it go away. In any event, they say, it is constitutionally protected, and therefore as sacred as, uh, regular junk mail.

But these guys are crumbs. Unlike purveyors of snail junk, spammers pay no penalty for their duplicative lists, dead addresses, and untargeted million-name, system-throttling maildrops. If they send your kids pornographic solicitations via Juno or Hotmail, too bad, because tracking them down is futile 99% of the time because the return addresses they provide are almost always false.

Everyone has a spam attitude. Celebrity cyberjournalist John Dvorak hates it, but he hates siccing the government after the bad guys via new criminal legislation even more.

But Dvorak holds out hope for another approach. Perhaps regulation and not criminalization holds the answer, he says. He wants the feds to squint enough to redefine spam as "broadcast material." After all, it is indiscriminate and untargeted, just like radio and TV. Then it wouldn't be protected speech, and government regulators could do to spam merchants what spam merchants have been doing to us: annoy them.

Bill Gates has even leaped into the fray. He believes net advertising should be legal, but that advertisers should have to pay users who open their messages -- perhaps a penny or two per mailing. The payment idea changes the Internet forever -- and plays into the hands of whoever has the most pennies.

Discussions for new Internet protocols are also underway. Human ingenuity being what it is, I wouldn't count on Internet II being spamproof. But you can participate in an interesting experiment. A group of long-time Usenetsters have created Usenet II (http://www.usenet2.org.), a mirror to Usenet that systematically quashes efforts to spam, flame, and crosspost -- practices that reduced the original Usenet to rubble.

But Usenet II is oppressed by its own utopian heavy hand. It employs a "soundness" doctrine to cull out illegitimate postings. If a post uses a forged header, it is declared unsound, and an electronic springdoor opens beneath it. The soundness doctrine is seductive. Like the psych experiment in which people are allowed to administer lethal shocks to one another, soundness czars tend to get carried away. Usenet II is about as invigorating as a hermitage.

What can you do?

You could close your Internet account. No more spam. Or anything.

You can lie low. Keep your address out of circulation and flecks of spam will not spatter your abode like spring rain.

You can filter your incoming mail, using e-mail program utilities to block all mail with "XXX" or "money-making" or "!!!" or "Cyberpromo" from your mailbox.

You can disguise your e-mail address. If your address is glorff@aol.com, change it on the "reply-to" header line to glorff@NO-SPAM.aol.com. Any human wanting to contact you will manually delete the "NO-SPAM." Spider-machines harvesting addresses en masse will be less clever.

Spam can afflict you like Job's boils -- see Jobs, Steven. But you never lose your right to choose your attitude. As BBS sysop Hue White, Jr. says, the Net is anarchy, and it is goofy of us to expect accommodation of our fine sensibilities in an otherwise loonytunes environment. We benefit hugely from the chaos and abuse, Hue says. So why don't we just shut up about it?

This attitude idea is no help to ISPs, whose pipelines are really clogged with real miles of the rosy gelatinous substance.

But that's their problem. All you have to do, as a user, is keep the crap from ruining your day and hurting your productivity.

Meanwhile, isn't it great? Here we have the Internet, the most potent development in human communication since speech. Like the baby in Solomon's tale, it is torn between two seemingly valid claimants -- greedy businesses reborn as first amendment scholars, and draconian reformers disguised as consumer advocates.

Unlike Solomon's tale, each side believes it is a real mother. And I'm not at all sure they're wrong.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.