Tuesday May 16 07:09 PM EDT
Anti-Spam Forces Gaining Ground
By Doug Brown, Inter@ctive Week
The daily furor over unsolicited electronic mail seems to have died somewhat, but the cause is alive and well in Washington, D.C., and there is even a new proposal to offer bounties for errant bulk commercial e-mailers.
The idea of establishing a bounty for spammers' scalps came up during the Spam Summit 2000 conference, held recently in the nation's capital.
The problem with anti-spam laws, some participants said, is that unless the unsolicited message onslaught is particularly troublesome, Internet service providers (ISPs) have little incentive to pursue the spammers in court.
A bounty, however, might make the idea of pursuing spammers in court more appealing. Bounties could even be distributed to individual Netizens, instead of just ISPs.
Ed Taliaferro, vice president of international auditing and information security at RCN Telecom Services, a company that offers bundled phone, cable and Internet services, said the bounty idea marks "the beginning of more proactive initiatives" on the spam front.
"People will start to realize that the reactive mode is more costly," Taliaferro said.
Overall, the anti-spam lobby appears to be gaining ground.
"It's remarkable, considering this is a slow year for Congress," said online privacy consultant Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters. "There's a lot of consensus between industry associations, activists and what ordinary people - constituents - want. Even the Direct Marketing Association wants to remove fraudulent spam and spam that misrepresents its origin . . . There's a strong alignment of interests here."
Such was the mood at the Spam Summit. And the number 3113 came up a lot. As in, H.R. 3113, the Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act of 2000.
New limitations
The bill, introduced last year by Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., was amended in March with provisions of another bill, California's Rep. Gary Miller's Can Spam Act, H.R. 2162. It was passed by the House Commerce Committee's subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection in March, and awaits consideration by the Commerce committee before the full House of Representatives weighs in.
Among other things, the providions of the bill would:
Require unsolicited commercial e-mail messages to be labeled.
Prohibit the use of an ISP's facilities to send unsolicited commercial e-mail if the provider's policy forbids such uses.
Give ISPs the right to sue spammers that violate their policies.
Many activists involved in the fight against spam applaud 3113, and the mood will become downright jubilant if the Senate decides to take up its own spam bill this session.
According to several sources, who did not want to be identified, a companion bill will be introduced in the Senate during the next several weeks.
"Congress is paying more attention to privacy issues in general, which is part of the reason spam legislation may do better this year than in the past," said David Sorkin, a law professor at the John Marshall Law School's Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law.
Sunil Paul, chairman of Brightmail, was less enthusiastic about legislative remedies to spam, mainly because, he said, "we analyzed 10 million pieces of spam in 1999, and there's virtually no compliance with state laws."
Why, he asked, should a federal law modeled after many state laws perform any better?
Technical blocks
The future of spam suppression, Paul said, rests with technologies such as Brightmail's, which lets ISPs quickly identify spam and remove it before reaching a Netizen's mail box.
"Now," he said, "The anti-spam community sees hope on the technology front."
In Brightmail's case, the company receives millions of spam messages from corporations and individuals. The company's "Spam Masters" are constantly analyzing the data and sending hourly updates to client ISPs about spam mail. The ISPs can then update their software to filter out the unsolicited e-mails. |
