Internet Censorship Essay - Internet Spamming and Censorship

Internet Spamming and Censorship      Ã‚  Ã‚   Not long ago, a manager of a giant Texas-based company wanted to sell his boat. In the old days, he would have posted a notice and a snapshot on the bulletin board in the employee lounge. This being the Nineties, he e-mailed everyone in the company a description of his boat's features and attached, of course, a few full-color images of the boat. As a result, his company's e-mail network crashed.    Incidents like this occur because massive e-mailings, especially with high-quality graphics, employ more bandwidth than the network allows. The fact is that a 15-second transmission of a high-quality video on the web (the multimedia aspect of the Internet) takes as much bandwidth as it would take to transmit the text of War and Peace.    The boat-marketing disaster is an example of what is known as internal spamming. The etymology of this new verb, to spam, is unclear. Most experts say its namesake is the canned lunchmeat. Others attribute it to the Monty Python routine about mindless offerings. In either case, spamming is the act of sending unsolicited, mass-distributed junk e-mail.    Spamming has arisen spontaneously as an outgrowth of the fact that transmission costs on the web have been reduced to almost zero. When spammers hit users with thousands of copies of the same message, havoc is wreaked. When massive e-mailing clogs users' incoming mail, the affected ones are not only the targeted users but also everyone else on their network. Frequent delays can cause deadlines to be missed, and businesses to go under.    Within an organization, abuse of technology is controllable by establishing explicit company policy and enforcing it with strict sanctions. How... ...a) introduced a complex bill called The Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Choice Act, and Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) has proposed a simple amendment to the existing law pertaining to junk faxes. The problem is that legislation only addresses the symptoms; it does not cure the disease. The observance of rules of conduct is effective only when there is common agreement in a society.    The Internet business has the unique characteristic of having no resource monopoly power; hence, it poses no threat to users' choices and freedom. Any attempt to regulate the Internet market through censorship of its pornographic tendencies will be met with considerable anti-christian sentiment, and it faces an uphill fight.    WORKS CITED: "C.N. Enterprises"  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   http://www.jmls.edu/cyber/cases/flowers1.html "Communications Decency Act"  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   http://www.epic.org/cda/