Ban Spam, Don't Just Filter It

Cloudmark, which manufactures spam filters for corporations, is hawking an e-mail rating system that it says could solve the problem of ‘False-Positives’ — solicited e-mail that gets caught in spam filters. Nice try, but technological solutions aren’t really going to solve the spam problem.

We think the solution is that spam should be made outright illegal. We’ve argued for that ever since 1997, when as a member of the Interactive Services Association’s Ad Hoc Consumer Privacy Task Force we were trying to craft guideline recommendations for submission to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s hearings about online marketing. (The other Task Force members were NetCreations, Microsoft, AOL, and AT&T. NetCreations and Digital Deliverance argued for a total ban on unsolicited commercial marketing e-mails, but the other members were against that ban. Guess which two companies later that year were quietly dropped from the Task Force?)

Solving the spam problem simply by installing spam filters and not making spam illegal is like solving the burglary problem by installing burglary alarms and not making burglary illegal.

Foes claims that making spam illegal won’t eradicate the spam problem. That’s true: making burglary illegal hasn’t eradicated burglary. It’s merely made our homes and offices a lot more safe, secure, and enjoyable.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.