In 2004, search engine company Lycos attempted to put junk mail websites out of business by giving the spammers a taste of their own medicine. The Make Love, Not Spam website run by Lycos tried to increase the bandwidth bills of spammers by flooding them with junk mail. Over 100 000 people downloaded the Lycos screensaver from the Make Love, Not Spam website. The screensaver deluged spammers with requests for data forcing many offline. The aim of the initiative was to slow down the growth of spammers’ websites. However, the company had to abandon the anti-spam idea after a wave of protests and criticism that the initiative was unethical.