Posted on 11/22/2003 2:13:49 AM PST by ruffisthudpucker
Edited on 07/12/2004 4:10:47 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
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.
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
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.
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.
If the advertisers like it, there is something wrong with it. What's the catch?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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