[ Thanks to jmalasko for this link.
]
“In 1994 the National Science Foundation ended its
prohibition of commercial speech on the Internet. At that time,
e-mail and Usenet were the main forums for communication, and
simple publishing systems such as Gopher were trying to establish a
wider user base. The Web had barely emerged. That year a law firm
named Canter & Siegel posted the first mass commercial spam on
Usenet, hiring a Perl programmer to generate advertisements for its
“Green card lottery” services, then blasting these to over 6,000
newsgroups. They became celebrities as well as villains, and
promptly launched themselves as an outfit producing spam for
others, promoting the benefits of spamming, and writing books on
“Internet marketing”. Since then no online forum has been safe from
inappropriate commercial advertising. As the Web has become a more
and more important venue for online discussion, and as Web 2.0
techniques have opened up venues for people to write to the Web as
much as to read it, the problem of spam has grown with a vengeance.“Sometimes Web spam is a minor nuisance, but more often it’s a
pernicious problem. Spammers will often not be content to post one
or two messages, but will often flood forums with their messages,
until it overwhelms the desired subject matter. Sometimes the spam
includes pornographic or antisocial messages that discourage
participation. Most search engines will devalue pages with such
messages, or with links to sites associated with spam, which means
that spam can reduce your search engine optimization. And the final
injury is that Web publishers end up wasting resources on
spam-fighting, taking time way from other tasks.”