Consumer justice, protest websites, and Internet guerrilla warfare

Disclaimer: I am definitely not suggesting anyone does the following but with enough unhappy customers it could happen to a company.

I call it email marketing list sabotage.

There is plenty consumers can do even without the help of any government institution.

Very often a notable proportion of business is through email marketing address lists and will likely be increasingly so. Businesses have been effectively forced by email providers into clearly placing an unsubscribe button in the email. Hotmail and Gmail both encourage users to help identify spam by reading and then clicking if it is spam or not. People add an extremely valuable layer when it comes to reconising spam. When a certain threshold of people identify certain characteristics (origin or words) of email as spam it can be used in future.

This is already reasonably effective in controlling spam but could be used as an effective mass expression of satisfaction against a company by the consumer.

1. Create a protest website (could be Facebook)
2. Instruct people to sign up to the company's email newsletter
3. On receipt of a newsletter identify it as spam devaluing their marketing potential.

I believe the Internet could turn out to be more valuable in keeping companies in line than any government agency and this is one example how.