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French Legislators Vote to Ban Spam
mlawmlaw writes "The Herald is reporting that France's National Assembly has voted 'in favor of banning unsolicited e-mail sales messages.' This is an admendment to a law to 'increase confidence in the digital economy.' This would ban 'direct marketing, notably advertising, via electronic messages' to individuals who had not given consent. The article is light on details, but it's nice to see France taking a step to reduce spam."
actually french fries weren't made by the french in france, but rather Belgium (source).
even then though, the evidence is sketchy. In reality the reason they are called French fries is because the way of cutting the potatoes is called "to french". Cutting a potatoe in long, slender slices is to french the potatoe. (Not to be confused with a different more modern "to french").
Just some interesting facts.
~ kjrose
> First, in order to enforce such a law you would
> have to create some sort of governmental agency
> where you would send your spam complaints
Fortunately for us, in France, we already have such an agency since 1978. It's called the CNIL (http://www.cnil.fr) for "Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés" (National Commission for Computing an Liberties), and principally deals with privacy issues and personnal information storage and retrieval.
Last year they opened a spam mailbox, for people to forward them spam messages, expecting about ten messages a day or so, but in a few days the mailbox quota exploded with more than 65000 messages...
Now they ARE aware !
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
First: Bulk snail mail is controlled in other civilized countries like the Netherlands. You can put a sticker on your mail slot to say you don't want to receive it. Just because something is a certain way does not suggest that it or its derivatives should be that way. That's called a "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy.
Second: The resources consumed in snail mail are compensated for in the form of postage to the carrier. It is comparatively zero cost to the recipient. Spam is paid for by people providing service to themselves, not to the person or bot sending the spam.
And then there's the situation regarding sites being bombarded with spam. I've received hundreds of messages in a tight timeframe (i.e., minutes). That's different from the onesie-twosie nature of most bulk snail mail. I suspect that if some jackass started walking up to your mailbox and stuffing it with 300 letters, all requiring sorting and inspection to ensure that good email isn't being thrown out unread, you'd probably be begging for this kind of restriction in The Real World(tm) as well.