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.

Comments

Get real

[Sad Loser]

This is a typical Australian head-in-the-sand position (IAAA): 'ban' it and it will go away.

Unfortunately Senator Alston does not seem to appreciate that we are connected to the rest of the world by this internet thing, and it may just be that courts in Russia and China will not recognise Australian juristiction in this matter.

It would be better if they saved their breath and did something useful like investigate some sort of token-based email, and maybe funded its development.

Re:How would this international cooperation work?

[squaretorus]

Yes. It depends on the law, but yes.

There are UK laws specifically making UK citizens who commit criminal acts abroad responsible under UK law. i.e. enjoy dodgy recreational pursuits while on holiday, come back and go to jail.

That you are actually committing the crime against another country while IN your own country certainly puts you under your local jurisdiction.

This law would protect the world from Aussie spam more than it would protect Australia from the worlds spam!

All Legal Solutions to Tech Problems are Bad

[tmundar]

Just about every legal solution to a technological problems end up backfiring. The problem is that most laws are so broadly written that they usually end up making something legitimate illegal as well.

Usually these laws end up fining someone who sends 'spam' described in legalese. Then, you forward a joke to someone who gets offended by it, calls it an unsolicited e-mail message, and then uses the law to extract money from your wallet. Meanwhile, since the spammers never send anything using their own return address, they just continue doing what they always have done.

I think of laws as the social equivalent of bug fixes in code. You fix one problem and unintentionally create 5 new problems.

Tom

Re:How would this international cooperation work?

[Marlor]

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.

Evil idea

[sstidman]

So if you did want to encourage law makers to pass anti-spam laws, I think it may be fairly easy to make it happen. Borrowing from the recent campaign to harass a spammer, what if people started putting the e-mail addresses of various lawmakers on the lists of spammers? I would imagine that if the lawmakers started getting tons of spam, they might be encouraged to do something about it. And I'm not just talking about US lawmakers, I'm talking about lawmakers everywhere. If Chinese or Russian lawmakers are overwhelmed with spam, they might just do something about it.