House OKs measure aimed at spammers

William Glanz ^

[ruffisthudpucker]

Congress moved closer to approving the first federal law outlawing unsolicited commercial e-mail late yesterday when the House passed an antispam bill. "This is a huge piece of consumer-protection legislation," Rep. Billy Tauzin, Louisiana Republican and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said before a voice vote approving the measure. The Senate passed a similar measure last month, and House and Senate negotiators yesterday reached agreement on the bill approved by the House. The Senate is expected to approve changes to the bill next week before it is sent to the president. The House antispam bill would allow spammers to send unsolicited e-mail to consumers until they ask the business to stop. Spammers would face penalties if they ignore the requests. Consumer groups said that opt-out approach will do little to address the flood of spam because it places the burden on consumers to contact marketers when they don't want to receive e-mail. Lawmakers should assume consumers don't want to receive spam unless they contact marketers and ask for the e-mail pitches, or opt in, said Laura Atkins, president of SpamCon Foundation, a group opposing spam. "Anything less is consumer unfriendly," she said. But lawmakers argued the spam law is significant. For the first time, consumers would be able to tell companies to stop sending unsolicited commercial e-mail, said Rep. Heather A. Wilson, the New Mexico Republican who was among the first to draw attention to spam more than four years ago. "We put together a good bill," she said during debate on the House floor. The measure approved by the House also gives the Federal Trade Commission authority to set up a "do-not-spam" registry similar to the agency's "do-not-call" list that lets consumers block telemarketing calls. FTC Chairman Timothy Muris has said he doesn't think a "do-not-spam" registry will be effective because spammers can easily hide their identities and cross international borders.

[ThePythonicCow]

Usually, when the Feds butt into some area looking to "make our life better" (get our vote) they mess it up.

Fortunately, in this case, it seems they are sufficiently clueless that this bill (at least as described in this article) will do little harm. This is good -- or at least better than usual.

While I might put my phone on a do-not-call list, there is no advantage to me to putting my email on a do-not-spam list. Such a list will be just another source of rather high quality email addresses for the spammers. It costs them almost nothing to spam every plausible email address they can guess or find, and they move wherever in the world they find it legally convenient to move.

Congress is impotent. Cool.

Not until we have a decent micro-payments mechanism in place that can affectively charge, say, a hundredth of a cent per email sent, will we have in place the basic structure - which must include unavoidable consequences for the excess spammer - that is the needed foundation of any practical way of reducing spam. Cold phone callers do have consequences -- each wasted call costs them a major fraction of a dollar. There is no affective feedback loop for spammers.

Unfortunately, the main ones pushing for such mechanisms are probably Microsoft, who wants to leverage additional monopolies, and various entertainment industries, who want to delay the collapse of their current business model. When this gets closer, governments will join in, wanting both the contributions from these wealthy monopolists, and a new tax base.

But, meanwhile, it's fun living on the frontier.

[MarkL]

Actually, I believe that the best way to minimize SPAM would be to modify existing laws that make it illegal to create DOS (Denial of Service) attacks, and other (currently) illegal "hacks," if a SPAMer can be documented.

Simply unleash a few thousand highschool kids on them, and let them take the SPAMer's ISP down. Of course, this would require strict "adult supervision," which means that congress can't have anything to do with that facet of the job.

Mark

[sam_paine]

What a buncha crap. This assumes these are legitimate US businesses that are concerned about breaking the law.


Wanna cut 50% of spam? Have the FDA rule that Viagra has a new side effect that makes you go blind or something.

Or, penalize any sender of email in a Chinglish dialect. "Happy you! Buy my very much ban CD!"

[Calpernia]

>>>>Not until we have a decent micro-payments mechanism in place that can affectively charge, say, a hundredth of a cent per email sent, will we have in place the basic structure

I don't see how this would work for emailers outside the country. And how would you regulate this? What if I set up an auto mailer at a Canadian (anywhere) server? You don't need to provide a physical address for those auto mailer databases.

[ThePythonicCow]

[micropayments] I don't see how this would work for emailers outside the country.

When most people chose, because it worked better for them, to not take delivery of email that could not be charged back for its deliver payment, then it can work. Micropayments would have to get to the point where they were very efficient and accurate, for this to be a sane choice.

Foreign bulk email tranferers would find that they were being hit with real unreimbursable charges if they accepted for transfer to major U.S. ISP's email for which they couldn't get their microcent from the sender thereof. And if the transferer didn't pay, they would be cut off from sending either all email, or at least the kind of email that had any chance of being delivered to the vast majority of U.S. users who only received "legitimate" (delivery charge paid for by sender) email.

It can start with one or a few big (probably U.S. centric) ISP's offering a premium service - some sort of certified sender email, say. Then, if they get their act together on the standard for submitting such email, so that any ISP in the world can so send it (and pay the micro charge per message for its deliver), and if price competition is thus opened on this service, driving its price down to close to its true cost, and if micropayments are well supported, at least between ISP's world-wide such that the true cost including payment collection overhead is indeed quite low, then finally this can become dominate.

Spammer's would find no one willing to take their millions of messages unless they also paid a corresponding thousands of dollars to pay for the delivery charge. And then finally spammers would begin to see a sufficient cost for a missent message to justify at least a little effort cleaning up their lists.

Right now, email is "open loop" - the only feedback to the spammer for sending out more of it is more customers. Well, unless they get the spam percentage up from the 50 or 70 per-cent that it is now to 99.9+%. In that case, they will start to see the laws of diminishing returns, rather like taxing governments do when they push the tax rates high enough to drive everything to the black market. Basically, people would stop using email in its current form.

The loop must be closed, and as often occurs, the best, if not only in this case, way to close the loop is with money.

[Calpernia]

What about autoresponders? Website update notifiers? Marketing auto mailers? Confirmation auto senders? eMail receipts?

[ThePythonicCow]

What about them? Your point is ...?

Honest - I can't tell if you are aghast that I would be suggesting that these email's would also have to pay to be received, or if, on quite the other hand, you are thinking that these sorts of messages would bypass what I envisioned, and am amazed that I would have missed something so obvious.

Just to be clear -- despite my not knowing to what point I am responding -- I envision a time when most people only receive email that someone, usually the sender, paid to have delivered.

For bonus points, an ISP could offer an automatic "pay by receiver" so that I could request that any email from say specified senders always be delivered to me, even if I have to pay the postage due.

Capitalism has worked every time it has been tried; and if we had micropayments working well, then capitalism could be applied to internet transactions that can't be subjected to that discipline currently, because their natural costs are a few to several orders of magnitude lower than can be efficiently paid with todays payment technologies.

[sweetliberty]

"Advertisers said yesterday they favored the House version and applauded lawmakers for pushing the legislation through."

If the advertisers like it, there is something wrong with it. What's the catch?

[Calpernia]

I see how the pay for delivery email works with just sending an email correspondence to a friend. But I can't see how it works for a virtual business setting.

The Net has lent a strong footing for small and medium size businesses to become competitive against large corporations. The Net has even made it possible for small and medium businesses to do service globally.

The tax per email would kill the virutal function of a business. Since I work in the virtual world there are way too many functions I see being killed off that are currently relied on.

Heck, I even see larger businesses that don't have their own in house server getting hurt alone by the 'interoffice email function'.

[sweetliberty]

How about setting up a blocking filter that would block email from any address that you did not authorize?

[Calpernia]

Preblocking can be done. But it won't solve the problems I just raised.

Example catch: If you are in the middle of setting up a new function, like say, you just ordered Stamps.com, a new software, or setting up any new service.

You have the blocking filter on for unknown mail, it does not yet recognize email from Stamps.com and you didn't tell it too cause you don't know how it works yet.

You order postage, you won't receive it.

Stamps.com is only an example. Many programs work like this.

Another example. You just bid and won at eBay.

I send you an email.

You don't know who you are receiving an email from. You won't get it cause you pre blocked it.

Another example.

You just do business with a company. Some set up their auto mailings at a independent marketing server.

You won't get their notifiers, cause you didn't know it was a 3rd party mail receiver to authorize it.

[sweetliberty]

Separate email addresses maybe....like I have my Outlook address and my yahoo address? I don't know. Just thinking with my fingers.

[Calpernia]

That is exactly what I do (and everyone should do).

I have my business email, throw away emails (ie., yahoo/hotmail), & email for friends to correspond to.

If you ever use a email for some type of sign up online, it should be done with a throw away email.

My business email that I use a mail client for has filters and settings. So this automatically takes out suspicious mail.

My throw away emails, I don't pop. I check them at the server. Nothing in their that is worriesome for hacking. But since they are spam vulnerable, I like the added server scan protection from Yahoo and Hotmail.

IMO, anyone that is totally overwhelmed with spam mail, they just haven't learned how to self manage. THAT info should be out their publicly rather than the gov stepping in.

[hunter112]

The tax per email would kill the virutal function of a business.

What if instead of it being a tax, it were a microcent that went to the ISPs involved for handling the mail on their servers? Also, if a business is emailing to its customers, then the microcent is just part of the cost of doing business, and the products and services would be priced accordingly. It's still way cheaper than any other form of communication.

However, if a small business is trying to generate business with unsolicited commercial email, then its part of the spam problem, and should be paying its own way.

[Calpernia]

>>>What if instead of it being a tax, it were a microcent that went to the ISPs involved for handling the mail on their servers?

Then an ISP needs to be defined first. Do you know how many computers are home servers? Some people just like that extra disk space. Some provide gateways.

>>>>However, if a small business is trying to generate business with unsolicited commercial email, then its part of the spam problem, and should be paying its own way.

This I think is the red herring being used for the Internet Tax. Cause this is already defined by the FTC and carries fines. Use the current laws that are in place. Publish more information on self controlling spam mail.

[ThePythonicCow]

The tax per email ...

Tax ?? Who said "tax" ?? Not I. I'm talking paying to those who move the email legitimate competitive fees for their services.

would kill ... small business ... virtual function

Huh? What kind of charges did you think I had in mind here? If a small business is actually sending out email in such volumes to its customers that the genuine cost, even today, to the ISP's and mail transferers handling that email exceeds what the value of those messages to the small business, then that business is a spammer who is freeloading off the Net's current inability to charge back for work done.

I'm talking hundreds or thousands of messages per penny here, in legitimate charges, by businesses performing a mail service, to the senders of that email. A normal (non-bulk-spamming) business will spend many times that, today, already, sending that message, in people, equipment and other costs.

I'm talking Capitalism and Technology here -- no government mandates, no laws. I'm not saying that this should be made to happen; I'm saying that it will happen. Technology will advance to the point that it can actually fairly and accurately charge the microcent it took to move a message along its way, and having done so, market preasures will apply.

Your average small business will likely never notice anything other than a limit such a "can't send more than a five thousand email messages per day per ISP connection, unless you pay this additional 2 cents per thousand."

That (or something like that) would kill the big spammers. If it would even be noticed by whatever business you're in, then good -- it's about time you paid for the services you're using. And if it would "kill" your current business, then you must be working for a spammer -- good riddance.

[ThePythonicCow]

block email from any address that you did not authorize?

You can do that today. Except for a very few people with very controlled email uses, this is way too crude. As someone else noted above, you will too often miss getting email from someone you wanted it from, because you hadn't put them on the list yet.

There are much more affective spam filters available even now. These filters can help you wade through the junk, filtering the wheat from the chaff. These filters don't cost the spammers sending the junk any expenses at all.

See the Spam / Virus Protection help screen of my favorite email service, Fastmail.fm, for what's available now, including blocking addresses that you do or do not authorize.

[ThePythonicCow]

Good post - thanks.

[ThePythonicCow]

Then an ISP needs to be defined first.

You mean "the ISP involved for handling the mail on their servers"? I think the person to whom you are responding just defined the ISP.

Do you know how many computers are home servers? Some people just like that extra disk space. Some provide gateways.

No - I don't know those numbers. Do you? And what does this have do to with this thread?

Use the current laws

You are amazing. It was you who recognized that laws aren't going to have much impact on offshore spammers. Now you say "use the laws, Luke".

the red herring being used for the Internet Tax

Huh? What does that phrase mean, in the context of this thread?