I don't want any spam! and net neutrality

As someone who has abandoned old email accounts because of the sheer volume of spam they received per day, I empathize with those who protest the annoyance of spam. But the reasoning for the Watchtower ruling is compelling, and a mapping of it onto the Internet seems to justify much of unsolicited email with political and religious leanings. Watchtower, however, does not totally protect unsolicited commercial efforts - the opinion even states that if the city ordinance just concerned commercial efforts, the city might have had a case given the city’s entitlement to protect its citizens from fraud and privacy - and so in mapping onto the web, commercial spam is seemingly unprotected and undermines much of the CAN-SPAM legislation which does protect a company’s right to spam. The Watchtower ruling reaffirms the idea that ‘the little person’ has a right to speak to an audience, not necessarily the right to profit from them.

Though the federal government may be entitled to regulate commercial spam, law is probably not the most effective tool in combatting commercial spam - the sheer volume and number of senders makes it extraordinarily difficult, and except for cases where senders of spam are engaging in criminal activity like stealing information, legal intervention does not seem worthwhile. The Virginia case, for example, was able to prosecute one spammer, and yet there are millions abroad and out of easy reach for the government. But what if people who don’t want any spam? The architecture of the internet can provide this protection from much better than the law; like a fence around the home, spam filters have become so pervasive and increasingly effective that the impact of spam is dramatically diminished. Moreover, the BSA study seems to suggest that, though virtually everyone receives some sort of spam, few actually read it, suggesting social norms and education regarding spam has reduced the issue - educating people, then, seems to be a powerful tool.

Regarding net neutrality, the fundamental issue surrounding Tribe and Goldstein’s argument, which the Benkler reading brings up, is that TG value the privileges of BSPs over the rights of individuals and their entitlement to freedoms of speech recognized by the First Amendment. Though TG say that an open Internet would be good, they maintain that BSP’s are motivated by a desire to ‘innovate in their products’ to meet the BSP’s ultimate goal of fulfilling the consumer’s need for a robust internet. What TG omit is that these companies are not motivated by a humanitarian concern for others, but rather by profit - not necessarily an inherently bad thing, but a fact which warrants regulation to ensure that the profit motive is not resulting in a destructive manipulation of the medium. TG also claims that government regulation to protect neutrality will slow the growth of the internet and the BSP’s ability to produce a good product; this claim is ludicrous - entire highly critical, profitable industries, like banking and utilities - are heavily regulated and largely meet the needs of its customers.

I may be confusing BSP’s, ISP’s and their respective roles, but it seems to me that these companies are not providing and producing content on the internet, but rather providing access to said content created by others. Given this, I do not see how ISP’s can decide what type of content an individual can and cannot consume, so the “traffic management techniques” which TG bring up seem unjustified (if an ISP wants to ensure a fast internet/good product for its consumers, it ought to expand bandwidth rather than manage what content is important or not). Moreover, as the Public Knowledge YouTube video notes, given this “traffic management technique” ISPs could easily abuse the system to increase profits, for example bottlenecking protocols like Skype or BitTorrent in exchange for its own paid alternative.

TG also makes the point that if BSP’s had greater control of internet traffic, it could enhance the aggregate majority’s ability to get information faster -- but what about minority? They are just as entitled to access to information, this implementation of a majority ruled internet would bottleneck their ability to access information and would likely squash out information and content on the internet that is unpopular, bringing up issues akin to opt-in programs’ we discussed in previous lectures. Without net neutrality protecting equal access to all information, how can you know that that extraordinary but not mainstream thing you have yet to see and experience is extraordinary if you have no access to it?

Question: What are other ways we can protect people from spam besides educating and spam walls? Are there more effective ways afforded by law?