[Ecommerce] Spam Costs U.S. Corporations $8.9B - an still no effort to address cross border regulation of spam

[James Love]

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-TechBits-Spam.html

Study: Spam Costs U.S. Corporations $8.9B
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 8:18 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- All those junk e-mail messages may promise instant wealth, 
but they can be quite painful to the bottom line.

A study to be released Monday attempts to quantify the annual cost of spam: 
$8.9 billion for U.S. corporations, $2.5 billion for European businesses and 
another $500 million for U.S. and European service providers.

Marten Nelson, an analyst at Ferris Research, says that while most spam can 
be deleted in one second, occasionally someone is duped into clicking the 
message. It also takes time to track down legitimate messages mistakenly 
tossed by inaccurate spam filters.

Figuring it takes 4.4 seconds on average to deal with a message, the 
messages add up to $4 billion in lost productivity for U.S. businesses each 
year.

Another $3.7 billion comes from companies having to buy more powerful 
servers and more bandwidth as well as divert staff time. The rest is 
attributable to companies providing help-desk support to annoyed users.

The costs are less in Europe because spam isn't as big of a problem, Nelson 
said. But in future calculations, Nelson said he may have to add the costs 
of wireless spam, a growing problem in Europe as text messaging gets more 
popular.


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James Love, Consumer Project on Technology
http://www.cptech.org, mailto:love@cptech.org
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