Spam, Spim, and Illegal Advertisement

Abstract

Economists and regulators, along with the Internet community as a whole, are involved in confronting illegal promotional strategies that may deregulate the advertising sector. Apart from the quantitative research (ex ante and ex post) on policy changes, spam and illegal advertisement are actions that target after all the average Internet user, factually challenging the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet. Alarming is also the projection of this situation to mobile telephony, the so called spim. Having reached record levels the last couple of years, the phenomenon of unsolicited commercial communication raised consciousness that the Internet was endangered by an erosive threat similar to the uncontrollable, massive, free circulation of MP3s that devastated the musical industry some years ago. Recent combined advances in the software industry and in the legal front have reduced the phenomenon. The technical, social, financial and legal parameters of this issue are examined in this article, under the prism of networked economies.