Using Uncensored Communication Channels to Divert Spam Traffic

Abstract

We offer a microeconomic model of the two-sided market for the dominant form of spam: bulk, unsolicited, and commercial advertising email. Most most spam is advertising, and thus should be modeled as a problem in the market supply and demand for advertising, rather than the usual approach of modeling spam as pure social cost to be eliminated. We adopt an incentive-centered design approach to develop a simple, feasible improvement to the current email system using an uncensored (open) communication channel. Such a channel could be an email folder or account, to which properly tagged commercial solicitations are routed without any blocking or filtering along the way. We characterize the circumstances under which spammers would voluntarily move much of their spam into the open channel, leaving the traditional email channel dominated by person-to-person, non-spam mail. We show that under certain conditions all email recipients are better off when an open channel is introduced. Only recipients wanting spam will use the open channel enjoying the less disguised messages and cheaper sale prices, and for all recipients the dissatisfaction associated with both undesirable mail received and desirable mail filtered out decreases.