• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, December 2, 2004

"Make Love Not Spam," Lycos Europe's new anti-spam initiative that officially launched earlier this week, appeared to have broken down by Thursday. Web visitors to the site on Thursday afternoon were met with a psychedelic-style graphic of the phrase "Make Love Not Spam," and the directive to "Stay tuned." By Thursday night, even that graphic was gone, and attempts to load the page on deadline were met with a message that the Web site was not responding.

Before its abrupt cessation, the anti-spam plan wreaked havoc on three sites--bokwhdok.com and printmediaprofits.biz and rxmedherbals.info--according to the Web analytics firm Netcraft.

The "Make Love Not Spam" initiative worked by inviting consumers to download a screensaver containing software that attacked alleged spammers' Web sites, ultimately decreasing their bandwidth. Lycos Europe representatives earlier said that Web sites would only be attacked if they were on a blacklist that had been manually vetted.

While the program's life was short--at least so far--the tactic caused a huge stir among marketers and industry observers. Some condemned the plan as verging on illegal for coming too close to crashing other companies' Web sites--considered unlawful denial of service attacks. Critics also charged that the software could end up targeting innocent marketers.

Lycos Europe did not respond to requests for comment Thursday, but a company spokesperson told MediaDailyNews earlier this week that the plan would not constitute a denial of service attack because the software merely sent enough traffic to a Web site to bog it down, as opposed to causing it to cease altogether.

But critics were not assuaged. "I have real concerns about it," said Trevor Hughes, executive director of the Email Service Provider Coalition. "It looks like a form of vigilante justice."

His concern was echoed by other marketing experts. "At best, this stuff smells kind of funny," said Alan Chapell, a lawyer and marketing expert. "Just because they're spammers and they're bad, that doesn't mean the end justifies the means," he said.

He added that an argument could be made that intentionally slowing down their Web sites is a form of denial of service attack, even if the attack stops short of completely shutting down service.

Critics also charge that relying on blacklists to determine which companies are spammers is in itself troubling. Bennie Smith, chief privacy officer at DoubleClick, said that many blacklists leave much to be desired. "Blacklists, as they traditionally existed, were very rarely based on objective criteria," he said. "Spam has always been in the eye of the beholder."

Chapell added that he witnessed firsthand how difficult it is for companies to remove their names from blacklists when a nonprofit he worked with found itself on one for having sent out newsletters. "It's guilty until proven innocent," he said.

Additionally, law-abiding marketers stand to lose a great deal if wrongly shut down--especially during the holiday season, when e-commerce sites count on making sales, said Hughes. "It is possible that they would pick up a listing that targets a legitimate company, and it is possible that that company could be harmed," he said. "That's where I get really disturbed and even angry at this kind of solution."