Canter & Siegel, the Phoenix law firm that created a furore when it advertised its ‘green card lottery’ services on Usenet news groups is not only unrepentent, but plans to do the same thing again, and again and again. Martha Siegel, a partner at Canter & Siegel, said in an interview with Computer Business Review, a sister magazine of Computergram International, that the green card lottery advertisement had been so successful that she and husband Laurence Canter now plan to set up an Internet ‘marketing agency’. This will offer a ‘full service’ including the distribution of commercial messages on behalf of commercial clients. Siegel said the green card lottery advertisement, which was sent out to Usenet news groups, had attracted between 20,000 and 30,000 expressions of interest. We got protests, yes, we got flamed, yes, but we got an enormous positive response’. The firm maintains that it has done nothing wrong, and has strong support outside the purist Internet community. If you cut through all this, what you will find is a group of old timers who don’t want their private domain invaded. She said that individuals in this group were making the loudest noise. It is highly presumptuous of those individuals to think that the Internet should not be carrying advertising. Other commercial companies were siding with Canter & Siegel, she said. Meanwhile, some of the best minds on the Internet are trying to devise ways to combat the perceived threat. Some users are working on programs that mail advertisers with fake messages that look like requests for information – thus flooding real responses with dross. Others are investigating software that will detect messages duplicated across many unrelated newsgroups and issue cancellations. It is going to be a long, hard war.
