One justification is all the dollars that you get for hosting the email accounts necessary to have 750K messages per day, and the fact that whatever the costs and scalability issues (which while tricky, reduce your costs), you are passing them on to the customer, who is still paying $1 or $2 per month, and you are still making money at this rate. People pay $10 per month in _taxes_alone_ for their home phone. The cost of spam is triffling. (actaully, Valdis is at a university, probably isn't directly billing, but could, and others do). Another justification is that the commercial mail houses all purchased T1+ network resources, and even small spammers purchased accounts from ISPs which purchased fiber, and contributed a small amount directly to an information economy that made all this possible. The sales made by these spammers also generated tax revenue and jobs. Congress, and the FTC, and the Courts favor business because money makes the economy move, and makes all these things possible. It makes it possible for people to send their kids to universities, which pay professors, and benefit the social fabric. Anti-spammers have for years said that spammers are stealing something. In general, this was never true. Spammers pay the same as everyone else. One of the things that spammers said in 1998 was that spam saves trees. I haven't heard this in a while, but I have no doubt they'll probably say it again, and its probably true. Lots of big companies want to use spam to make money, and/or reduce their costs. People own those companies. People work for those companies. Government get lots of tax revenue from those companies. Thats a pretty powerful justification. Those of us who worked on the internet pre-commercialization can understand a time when commercial activity was "immoral", and done outside the internet. But that isn't the case anymore. You can't simply say "commercial activity is immoral". But that time is past, and its never going to come back. You can't get anywhere unless you understand what the opponents can say about their activities, and react rationally, reasonably, and responsibly. The only real harm I can see, is that spam is annoying. But real, bonafide commercial spammers are getting better at not sending me email if I ask them not to. So it seems the annoyance is coming from somewhere else. Somewhere that isn't commercial, and isn't commercial speech. --Dean