Spam Divide
In rich countries, unsolicited e-mail, or spam, is a nuisance. For people in poor countries, it’s a costly threat to development. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. "Spam won’t halt the development of [information technology]" in poor countries, says Suresh Ramasubramanian, the report’s author and manager ...
In rich countries, unsolicited e-mail, or spam, is a nuisance. For people in poor countries, it's a costly threat to development. That's the conclusion of a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. "Spam won't halt the development of [information technology]" in poor countries, says Suresh Ramasubramanian, the report's author and manager of anti-spam operations at Hong Kong-based Web mail provider Outblaze, "but it will severely retard it."
In rich countries, unsolicited e-mail, or spam, is a nuisance. For people in poor countries, it’s a costly threat to development. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. "Spam won’t halt the development of [information technology]" in poor countries, says Suresh Ramasubramanian, the report’s author and manager of anti-spam operations at Hong Kong-based Web mail provider Outblaze, "but it will severely retard it."
In developing nations, bandwidth is expensive and connection speeds are often slow. Spammers can effectively bring a nation’s network down — or reduce it to a snail’s pace — by flooding people’s inboxes. And local Internet service providers lack the software or trained staff to do anything about it.
The impact spam is having on developing nations remains largely unstudied, and Ramasubramanian says it’s hard to put a dollar figure on developing-country losses, but it is surely well into the millions of dollars each year. What’s worse, thanks to weak technology laws, developing countries are becoming havens for spamming operations from the United States and Europe. For instance, American-born spammer Steven Worrell — who sends e-mails promoting pornography, gambling, and financial scams — maintains a Florida address but runs his operation from a server in Costa Rica.
How can developing nations stop the flood? Software based on free operating systems such as Linux could immediately halt as much as 50 percent of poor-country spam. Ramasubramanian says that’s a solution that should be employed right away. Because bridging the digital divide is useless if what lies on the other side is a pile of junk mail.
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