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."

Comments

No way to enforce thhis

[rudy_wayne]

I am completely in agreement with the idea of outlawing spam and have long wished for such a law in the US. Unfortunately, the more I think about it, the more I realize, there's just no way to enforce such a law.

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 and they would go after the spammers. This, of course, results in the creation of another bloated government bureaucracy fincanced by your tax dollars. This raises a number of issues -- not the least of which is "how much benefit will you really get in return for the millions of dolars that will be spent".

The second problem, and the most frustrating, is one that I have run into in my own attempts at fighting spam. When I trace the IP addresses of the spam which arrives in my inbox daily, I find that more and more are originating from foreign countries, including Korea, China, Spain and Brazil.

So, no matter how tough your anti-spam law may be, it's worthless when spammers cant take advantage of open relays in foreign countries.

Re:No way to enforce thhis

[jalet]

> 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 !