This kind of interference does give rise to huge negative impacts to an electronic business operator with E-mail the main methods or even the only way to communicate with its clients and contact business. Just image the necessity for their employees to carefully identify real order forms and picking them out with the caution of not mistakenly deleting them from a heap of spam when they get up to send and receive E-mails but to find the mail box filled with spam, topic as “You Need to Speak Fluent English”， “Secure Authorization Process” ,“Associate Bank eManager Please Update Your Identity”， “Join 21st Century Club, and you will get 21st Century Commercial Comments for half an year for free ” ,“Financing Weekly” etc.
Negative effects of spam is not only intrusion but also real costs of society. Internet transfer loads are increased. More and more powerful filtrating techniques need to be developed by net and E-mail service providers. According to the statistics of 2004, spam gave rise to US companies an extra cost of 9 billion dollars. [3]The costs of broad band and technique update will be a ultimate burden of consumers. [4]
Filtration softwares may make mistakes, such as some over-alert ones` deleting non-spam when filtrating spam, which may undermine the information communication function of internet.
What’s worse, turning from ordinary intrusion , spam has become to a real threat to the internet security[5] with phishing E-mails ,porn E-mails, spy software infringing privacy, defrauding consumers, and craplets spreading computer virus even tools of crime.
Cost of spam is burdened by net service provider and E-mail receiver, whereas, the interest is enjoyed by the mail sender. Different from posting mails by postal system in real world with the cost and fees covered by the sender, the service cost of the sender is almost zero, but profits may be huge by sending spam to release commercial advertisements and marketing products, which is the exact foundation of the first successful commercial direct marketing in history. April 12th ,1994 ,is the birthday of spam. On that day, a lawyer named Cater and his wife sent advertisements to approximately six thousand news-consumer groups on internet for the consideration of marketing their legal services on immigration. Though great indignation was evoked, with one hundred million dollars income it was commercially successful. From then on , businessman started to realize the potential of E-mail as low-cost but efficient method to connecting potential customers, so the E-mail advertisement booms. [6]
1.2 The internationality of spam issues
Because of the social harmfulness, many countries frame special regulations for the purpose of supervising and reducing spam. The following parts are examples of United States and Australia which represent two different methods on domestic legislation supervision : the former one belongs to “choose to exit” legal method, putting emphasis on mail contents supervision, and the latter falls into “choose to enter” legal method which prohibit sending direct marketing E-mails contrary to the desire of receivers.
But the implementation effect of internal supervision is not ideal irrespective of applying the “choose to exit” method or the “choose to enter” one.
From a worldwide perspective, spam receiving rate at user ports is an important benchmark of regulation implementation effect. It was a little bit more than fifty percent in 2003, but the average rate was sixty to ninety percent in 2007 after a four-year-debating both in legislative and enforcement fields. [7]Another report from MessageLabs on annual information of 2006 said that world spam rate was up to 86.2 percent. [8] In addition, the spam block amount by net service provider is also an index to show the severity of this problem. According to a report from Microsoft in 2007, about 3.2billion spams were blocked by their hotmail server filtrate software per a day. [9]
Though there are multidimensional reasons for implementation ineffectiveness, such as economic, technical and legal reasons, from international collaboration and international law aspects, lacking of efficient international supervision and implementation cooperation in fighting against spam is an significant causation.
On the premises that internet is borderless which enables spam to break through form the country with weakest supervision system and diffuse to ever single corner where internet accesses, international cooperation mechanism is important to spam governance. If there is one country with legislation combating E-mails unmatched to their policies or applying strict supervision, the only thing for the sender to do to send E-mails globally is to transfer the platform to another country with less or even no supervision, no matter it is Korea or Germany. The example of Canada, the second largest source of spam in 2004 according to an investigation,[10]where no E-mail supervision prior to 2007, illuminated the global transfer of internet and E-mail problems.
