By Richard D. Erlich

Spam is not a victimless crime, and I immodestly propose below what I think is a suitable punishment. Before getting to that, however, I need to dispose of more moderate suggestions since it is indeed true that radical means should be adopted only if there are no other ways likely to reach important ends.

It has often been suggested, since spam first became a problem, that the obvious solution is to charge for e-mail.

A US penny per post is the usual price mentioned nowadays, but even if the cost were only a few mils --thousandths of a dollar -- the job could get done. The only reason it makes economic sense to broadcast to the world offers for sexual enhancers, fantastic mortgage deals, and the opportunity to aid notable Nigerians is that the cost of doing so is effectively nothing. Start charging for the service, and a .0001% (or whatever) rate of response won't bring any profit for the e-barrage.

However, for technical, philosophical, and political reasons, this ain't a-gonna happen any time soon; indeed it won't happen until the Internet is nearly swamped and brought to a standstill.

Nor will technological quick fixes do the trick: at least some spammers will always be ahead of their opponents.

So we need to support the geek police in the technological fight, but their efforts must be reinforced with something else, and I think I know what: what is called in the old play Gorboduc, "wholesome terror to posterity," and, more to the point, "wholesome terror" to the techno-evildoers working their evils now, and totally terminal termination of the evil-doing of several of them even more "now."

I'm philosophically against the death penalty, but I think we should apply it to spammers, and apply it in a manner that will make the point: the guillotine. I know some people will object: the guillotine is messy, and it's French, but it's quick and doesn't raise the ethical problems of needing a physician to assist, or even to certify death on the spot: any coroner's assistant can certify that someone without a head is definitely, indeed definitively, dead.

But that's a detail, and I'll hardly insist upon the method. What needs to be argued is justification.

• First, it's standard doctrine that a high probablity of punishment is a far more effective deterrent to crime than severity of punishment. Still, as the effectiveness of enforcement goes down, it is tempting to use severity to beef up deterrence. In the case of spammers, I recommend we vigorously succumb to that temptation.


• Second and far more important, it is just to execute people for spamming. And herein will consist the rest, and the heart, of my argument.

Consider: We judge the death of a young person far worse than the death of an older person, and we do this even when it's blatantly obvious that society has lost more with, say, the suicide of a 28-year-old physician than of a 14-year-old high school student: society has a major investment in the physician, whereas the high school student can be replaced pretty quickly: in about 15 years, through the efforts, as an old joke has it, of mostly unskilled labor working for free. Our main motivation may be sentimentality, but we are still right to mourn more for the child. Death comes to all, but when death comes varies, and what is at stake is the time lost.

In a sense, all we have is time, and murderers take time away from us, more from the young than from the old.

Bit by bit, and byte by byte, spammers rob us of time, and those who send out millions of spam e-mails (aye, and junk snailmail and telemarketing "robocalls" as well)--well, when you add up those bits you get lives. And over the months and years you get many lives.

And when that time adds up to hundreds of lives, we must proclaim spammers mass murderers and punish them accordingly.

As they have stolen time from us, so we should limit their time.

Very firmly, very finally.

International authorities should add up the volume of spam and the seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years of people's lives shot to hell because of it, and each time it adds up to three-score and ten -- that's 70 years -- a spammer should be arrested, quickly tried, and executed.

This will not solve the problem of spam, but it should help to reduce the volume. In any event, "Though the heavens fall, let justice be done," and justice demands the ultimate punishment of those who'd suck away the life-time of millions.

Richard D. Erlich is a Professor Emeritus of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is a recent immigrant to the California Bear Flag Republic.