Bill Gates; Can Bill Clean Your IN Box?(Interview)

Byline: Steven Levy

As much as three quarters of the electronic mail sent over the Internet consists of unwanted and certainly unloved spam--everything from offers to buy Vicodin to shocking porn to messages with viruses embedded in them. But one man thinks we've turned a corner in taming the spam beast, and since he goes by the name of Bill Gates, it's worth hearing his plan, which involves not only technology but law enforcement and cooperation among companies. Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect dropped by NEWSWEEK on a trip to New York to share the good news with Steven Levy:

LEVY: How much do you feel that it's Microsoft's responsibility to lead in eliminating spam?

GATES : Heavily. We're not the cause of the problem. We don't send spam. But if the problem isn't solved, it's terrible for our users, and therefore it's terrible for the whole idea of software empowerment, which is what we're all about. And so it's incumbent on us to do everything we can do by ourselves, but also to take the lead in reaching out to law enforcement, and to ISPs [Internet service providers]. You've seen us do things like forming an alliance with all the ISPs based on the antivirus stuff. It's been supersuccessful at blocking things. When you block things, you never get headlines. When things aren't blocked, then you get headlines. So it's incumbent on us to be the first mover.

Last January at the Davos conference you said that we were two years away from eliminating spam. How is that effort going?

We're actually doing superwell on this. The only big negative in e-mail has been the benefit of making it super-, supercheap to send somebody a message; it becomes a problem in that somebody abuses it because it's so cheap for them to essentially steal your time. That's what happens when spam shows up in your in box--they're taking your time away, and your time is a valuable resource. Spam exploded about a year and a half ago. At that time we laid out a plan for how we would bring spam down very, very dramatically.

To a nuisance level?