UBE increases costs for ISPs, who must purchase additional equipment to handle the onslaught. These costs are frequently passed on to customers in the form of increased monthly fees. Additionally, some users may incur extra costs while waiting for their computer to download unwanted e-mail. This is mild compared to some reports in the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email, where System Administrators and frustrated users share tips and information about spammers and spam fighting. Unsolicited faxes are already illegal, because in this case the cost-shifting to the recipient is obvious, whereas the time it takes me to delete and respond to unsolicited mail is less easily tractable.
Spammers cloud the issue.
The most frequent argument that spammers use to defend their inequitable consumption of network bandwidth is the first amendment right to freedom of speech. This is disingenuous for many reasons, as the courts have consistently upheld the fact that commercial speech does not share the same first-amendment protection as private speech. The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain. Let me explain what really happens. The Federal Trade Commission estimates that there are roughly 20 million small businesses in the United States.