How Two Lawyers Invented Spam in 1994
Ever wonder who invented internet spam? If you were thinking an enterprising teenager in a dark basement or maybe even a group of misfits in a foreign country, you’d be wrong. It was, unfortunately, a pair of US lawyers who invented spam in 1994. That’s right, on April 12, 1994 Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, a pair of immigration lawyers from Arizona, invented commercial internet spam.
The story of Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel
In 1994 the Web as we know it today didn’t really exist. Instead, people interacted through a bulletin board system, called Usenet, which was a way for people to talk and share files. Canter and Siegel decided to advertise their immigration services on Usenet by building an automated script that posted ads to every single active bulletin board. This was the first act of commercial internet spam, or, as Wired Magazine dubs it, “The spam that started it all.”
The results of Canter and Siegel’s spam experiment
For their pioneering efforts in spam the couple earned threats, fake inquiries, blank faxes, bogus magazine subscriptions and the general ire of countless early internet users. They were also banned by their internet service provider. On the other hand, Canter and Siegel claimed they made $100,000 from the spam, according to Time Magazine, and defended their actions with rationales like, “There’s no one to pay for the ad. No one owns [the Internet].” Later in 1995 the couple even published a book explaining “how to make a fortune on the information superhighway.”
Canter and Siegel today
Laurence Canter was disbarred in 1997 and Martha Siegel passed away in 2000. In fairness to the couple, it’s difficult to measure their 1994 “spam” activities against today’s Internet, and it’s not as if spam wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for them. Still, what they did enraged enough people back then to make it clear they crossed a line, even if it was their stunt that defined that line.
In a 2002 interview with CNET, Canter, who went on to be a programmer, remained unrepentant — “Given the same set of circumstance–the same time, the stage of the Internet–I’d probably do the same thing. Somebody would have done it, if we hadn’t done it.”
