Slashdot Mirror
Australian Considers Outlawing Spam
An anonymous reader writes "The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on spam down under. I guess it goes to show that if something that bothers us also bothers enough politicians then something may be done. Interestingly, the article discusses international co-operation wrt spam. Good thing too. With only 2% of the global economy, it'll take more than Australia to beat the spam problem. Perhaps someone should send a 'group letter' to all relevant politicians in various countries to start co-operating? :)" Update: 04/16 11:56 GMT by H : There's another article on the subject as well, running in The Australian.
The proposal in the Australian report is to ban unsolicited commercial e-mail (opt-in). Now if only the US Senate would pay attention to that instead of introducing idiotic opt-out bills like the one recently introduced, that would actually increase spam.
There was an article a while back about a political group for geeks, right? something similar to the labor party or the populist party?
perhaps we should have them mailing stuff out. I'd actually like to see slashdot get behind them a little more, keep it to ONLY geek related issues(no war protest/mongering).
Wouldn't it be great if they mailed a message to your congressman saying "yeah, we have the slashdot population of 300,000 behind us. do something about _______ or you'll force us to vote, and you really don't want that."
hell, if the farmers of the 1900's can do that with the populist party, why can't we? We count as a special interest group too.
(please, if you have anything thoughts about it, reply. don't be rude or cynical.)
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Nah, at least you can prosecute Australians sending spam to other Australians and perhaps abroad. If every country banned it then spam would decrease dramatically.
Fair enough, it might not help you now but it's a step in the right direction in my opinion.
This law would protect the world from Aussie spam more than it would protect Australia from the worlds spam!
That's basically the idea. The report states that the Australian Government should push for the creation of an international agreement on outlawing spam (i.e. similar to the current international IP agreements).
Introducing domestic anti-spam laws is obviously the first step to achieving this. It would be difficult to convince the international community to introduce similar laws if Australia didn't have them in place themself.
Despite this, until some form of international consensus is reached, these laws are basically just a symbolic gesture.
Just about every legal solution to a technological problems end up backfiring.
The thing is, spam isn't a techological problem, it's a social one.
If spam were purely a techological problem, there would be a technological solution. The fact that there are people out there who don't care that they're harrassing millions of innocent people means that there is no technological solution.