NEW YORK – Viruses, phishing, spyware, spam, denial-of-service attacks, botnets… You have probably heard these words, and perhaps even suffered from what they signify, with or without knowing it.

I’d like to lay out a simple path to addressing (not resolving) these security problems, one that does not require agreement among all governments (or people) on what really constitutes a crime, much less a global police force or unenforceable global treaties.

If we can increase security in general, then governments can focus on the real criminals. 

A better approach is to view computer security as an issue of public health and economics, in which people can protect themselves but must pay for the costs they impose on others. We need to enable people to defend themselves against others; prevent innocent, well-meaning people from becoming infected and harming others; and reduce the incentives and ability of the ill-intentioned to do harm.

That sounds like a lot of different challenges. But there are effective approaches to each of them that do not require tracking everyone online, or requiring IDs for every interaction. Tracking user IDs will not enable us to catch or stop bad guys, and it will render the Internet impossible to use.

We can’t save cyberspace by destroying its openness.
To implement effective security, the entities best equipped to do so, the Internet service providers, must take the lead.

They are technically savvy organizations with the ability (more or less) to protect users and detect abusers; they have a direct (though impersonal) relationship with their users; and they compete for users’ business, so that, unlike governments, they will suffer if they perform badly. 

The ISPs (rather than governments) should provide basic security – anti-virus, anti-phishing, anti-spam, and the like – as a regular feature of consumer Internet services.

This is not hard to do. A number of anti-virus companies compete to offer consumer security services; each ISP could select one, or offer its customers a choice of three, for example. 

The trick is to get consumers to use these tools – which will require an awareness campaign along the lines of public health messages.  The result should be something closer to widespread hand-washing than to a system of acute-care hospitals. 

As for spam, ISPs (including mail service providers) could limit their users to, say, 100 e-mails a day; for more, you have to pay or at least post a security bond, or pass some good behavior test.

At the same time, all ISPs should implement an e-mail ID system (there are two good standards, called Domain Keys and SPF). This is not to track everyone’s mail, but to prevent bad guys from spoofing good guys.

ISPs would throttle traffic from ISPs that did not join the security collective, and pretty soon their customers would complain, forcing them either to join or find themselves relegated to the underworld, from which it would be hard to launch attacks because no one would accept their traffic.

And, because ISPs answer to other ISPs, not governments, dissidents and whistleblowers could maintain their anonymity.

As for anti-phishing and malware downloads, there are a number of services that track "bad” sites and warn users off. Users can still go where they want, but at least there are signposts warning that they are entering a dangerous neighborhood. 

Google does this in its search results, working with StopBadware.org (I am an advisory board member), and both Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer offer similar protections. 

In all cases, adventurous users or professionals can overcome the paternalism, but only by paying what amounts to liability insurance, for the risks they impose on the system.

The point is to create economic incentives to reduce cybercrime. Real criminals won’t be deterred, but such a system would prevent the rest of us from being pulled along or becoming victims. With fewer victims, crime will pay less.  

There are several reasons why this has not yet happened. The first is inertia, combined with (or disguised as) idealism – the mistaken idea that the Internet should be free not just for speech, but also from payment. 

Yet it costs something to maintain an infrastructure that keeps people safe.

Indeed, cost – both to users and to ISPs – is the second obstacle. The challenge is to acknowledge the costs (as we are now doing with pollution) and assign them to people who can – and can be compelled to – pay for them. After all, we accept the costs of police forces and health care, including not just hospitals, but also clean water, safe food, etc.

So how do we make this happen? ISPs need to pass these costs on to their customers. But they won’t, because they compete mostly on price. So customers need to demand security as part of their service, while ISPs need to shun ISPs that don’t comply.

To help things along, someone should file a lawsuit – not too many! – against ISPs who tolerate misbehavior.  The targets should be ISPs that willfully serve criminal customers, refusing to deal with complaints to the point that ignorance is no longer a legitimate excuse.

But ISPs’ costs also include warning people away from bad sites, which requires a due-process system to notify owners of compromised websites – so that they can fix them or realize that they have been exposed.

Such a system is relatively expensive to manage, but it is cheaper than the costs of not having it.

These changes would not create some digital nervous system with a centralized brain that could solve all problems.

Instead, they would result in something like an immune system of competing ISPs and evolving security services, local and omnipresent.  That would vastly improve the overall computer-security situation: Ordinary people would feel secure and law enforcement and security specialists could focus on the biggest threats.

Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings, is an active investor in a variety of start-ups around the world.  Her interests include information technology, health care and private aviation and space travel.