The American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers, and the Direct Marketing Association support the Senate’s CAN-SPAM Act and the House’s Reduction in Distribution of Spam Act, claiming $17.5 billion will be spent in 2003 due to legitimate commercial email.
Both the bills endorsed by the marketers, like the other six spam bills before Congress, are of the opt-out variety – meaning anybody, legitimate or not, can send as much spam as they like, as long as they respect recipients’ wishes not to be spammed in future.
Anti-spam activists claim anything short of an opt-in law similar to those in Europe will fail to tackle the problem. The Electronic Privacy Information Center calls CAN-SPAM, the only bill to so far pass through one of the houses of Congress, weak.
Eight state attorneys general also do not like CAN-SPAM, claiming it creates too many loopholes, exceptions and high standards of proof that it provides only minimal protection.
CAN-SPAM, for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing would require spam to be labeled, include opt-out and the sender’s physical address.
It would also ban deceptive headers and criminalize various spam-related practices such as using Trojans to create open email relays, using scripts to create large numbers of email accounts, and falsifying source IP addresses.
RID-SPAM has similar measures to CAN-SPAM, but has yet to be passed by the House.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
