The Chinese censors see great harm in words like “Democracy”, “Tiamen Square”, and “Sex”, and such words are vaporized as they cross Chinese routers, but email spam with brashly emboldened fake URLs proclaiming origination from “PhishingLureFly.com” go blasting across their censor system routers faster than the fly on the rod with triple leads.

Obviously, the Chinese government is facilitating the massive spam assault upon us. They could stop it easily if they wanted to, and they have all of the tools in place to do so (not that I advocate such tools for draconian government intrusion into communications). I am not indicating that I endorse censorship. In this country (U.S.), due process is “officially” the only condoned method to stop spammers (thank God), and I would hope that such were the case in China too, except that (of course) it isn’t.

But, they could use the equivalent of their due process (that isn’t), to stop the spam.

In other words, the solution to spam lies with the embassy workers and the embassy officials representing each of the world’s countries inside of China. Perhaps the U.N. could be involved, but in any case it’s a diplomatic problem, not a technical one.

When spam accounts for something 97% of all emails, freeing up all that bandwidth and the associated hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars spent globally to keep you and I and 1.2 billion of our closest friends from reading spam would free up money that could easily be used to fix buildout problems, fund international interoperability standards organizations, etc.