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EU Rolls out Anti Spam Strategy
An anonymous reader was one of several who noted an article about the latest developments in the
EUs War on Spam. The article is pretty realistic in pointing out that EU Legislation won't be very effective unless Asia and the US do something as well.
The article is pretty realistic in pointing out that EU Legislation won't be very effective unless Asia and the US do something as well.
I think that view is actually overly pessimistic. I'd agree that a relatively complete solution won't exist until the US and Asia also act, but it's not like a global solution is going to be decided upon and implemented in one swell foop. If something like this works well for the EU, it provides a viable option for others to follow. Frankly, I think users would be much better off under the "opt-in" method rather than "opt out" which is being considered here. It will all come down to lobbying, of course. In the opt-out corner are the advertising and marketing industries, while the ISP's basically represent opt-in. Users are left on the sidelines.
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Ahh, the American way.
The United States is considering a handful of bills that take an ''opt-out'' approach
I don't get it. Why are the states taking such a reactive approach to this instead of a proactive approach?
Both are useless without the enforcement of the legislatures, but "opt-in" is alot more hassel-free.
Sadly, this is utter, utter shite.
While it is possible to forge headers, use open relays, trogan poor @Home users PCs, etc, etc then SPAM will not be defeated by legislation.
Tighten the protocols, then we have a fighting chance.
The article fails to mention what the penalties are for companies that violate their new anti-spam laws. Are they simple little fines like are trying to be pushed here or do they have harsher punishments? Simply labelling SPAM as illegal won't do a whole lot unless violators have something serious to fear.
KappaStone
I think people are slowly beginning to realise that 'spam is evil'. Governments never have been the first ones to embrace 'new' ideas.
/. crowd is ahead of this, and it is often hard to believe that people are /not/ seeing spam and popups and spyware as the threat we conceive it to be. Talk about it with your mother or your less 'educated' friends to see what they think of it and be surprised. We need to create awareness before we can create laws...
Once the majority of the people realizes that the Internet is turning into one huge advertisment brothel, where you will be flooded with advertisments, autodialers, etc. etc. unless you follow a 2 week course on how to protect yourself, things will turn ugly for spammers.
The
My job is maintaining a Web/E-mail server, and I know just what a pain it is to deal with spam. But, if the government starts to regulate "spam" how are they going to decide what is spam and what isn't? MY favorite phrase is "run your life so the government won't have to, you won't like it if they take over" that makes sense. Don't get me wrong, I despise spam, and want to get rid of it as much as the next person, but how is this going to be controlled? I think we should proceed with EXTREME caution in situations like this or things will just get worse.
-=You might be a geek if your computer is worth more than your car=-
I don't think legislation is necessary anyway. I'm leary of laws that tell me how and to whom I can send messages. Anyway, if large ISP's would just block ip the sources of the spam (btamail.cn comes to mind) they could do a lot to alleviate the problem. I would rather live with minimal amounts of spam limited by filters than be forced to have laws that forbid it.
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I'm going to have to agree with the EU's stance that there should be similar objectives put in place by the US and Asia. I think there should be more countries involved also, but these were the two that were mentioned. In a similar stance, think about having just Iowa and Kansas (random states chosen) with strict anti-spam measures. Fine...spammers will move to VA and PA. Same will happen all over the world.
We DO need a worldwide organization to help curtail this. Isn't this the global economy nowadays? Let's treat it like one.
I would like to see however, someone being proactive. Yay EU! Pity Asia may wait and see. Pity the US may wait and see. If we all act at once, it may send the signal we're serious about this and not just testing the waters and not truly committed to ridding ourselves of this global economy drain.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
A final point: maybe the European approach is more effective, maybe not, but I don't see why legislative uniformity is necessary.... As long as all countries are effective in decreasing the incentive/legality for spammers to exist, does it matter? Silly example -- let's say large country A fined each piece of spam at $1 million, and large country B implemented the death penalty for spamming -- I think spam would decrease a lot pretty quickly. Anyway, if several competing approaches are tried on a large scale, and one is far and away a success, others will follow suit. Please don't posit US government conspiracies to protect spammers -- all the Nasdaq-100 companies hate spam (e.g., Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple). So do 99.9% of their online constituents. Those are the parties US legislators will (at least try to) protect.
The article quotes a xs4all.nl spokesperson who says xs4all.nl has 14 of its 250 employees dedicated to handling issues relating to spam.
Let's say they get paid at about $15K / year. That's $200K on a single ISP in a single country.
Add the cost of site licenses on spam filtering software used in Europe. Add a fraction of the cost of all IT support people in every business that's connected to the Internet in Europe. Extra hardware costs to store all that junk, etc. etc.
It adds up.
AOL users alone, put together, pay several million USD every month, because of spam (AOL raised their fees by $2 / month sometime last year because of spam related costs).
Proletariat of the world, unite to kil spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
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Oh, we understand that. Doing something about it when you have an incredibly strong and politically active business sector is rather difficult, actually. And here, with 280M people, political campaigns are very expensive. Hence, congressmen have to sidle up to Big Business.
You have to remember, because America is so huge, we're faced with some interesting problems that Europe doesn't typically consider. Also, since we fashioned our modern democracy first, perhaps we didn't do it best, allowing others to learn from our mistakes in some ways.
However, none of that means that Americans don't realize how we're getting bent over in a lot of ways.
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Spam is a cost effective, if obnoxious, solution for advertising
And burglary is a cost effective, if obnoxious, alternative to working.
Even though theft is illegal, it won't stop people from doing it. Does this mean that we should simply throw all of the theft laws?
Spam is not "cost effective", it's theft - and no legitimate business would engage in the process of stealing from people it wants to sell things to.
We need to start somewhere, and this is as good a place as any.
the companies who want to sell you the damn Viagra and fine their butts off, its all useless.
The only way to stem the flood is to target those who think they benefit from it.
If the VENDOR who uses Spam has to cough up a massive fine, they will put the spammers out of business. It has nothing to do with who sent you the friggin' email but who's trying to get youto spend money. Once it COSTS THEM far more than their RateOfReturn, the Spammers will suck wind.
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It's going to require more than just new laws and legislation. To fix the spam problem, you need to fix the SMTP protocol. At one time it may have seemed ok to allow anonymous, unverified mail services, but today, it is unpractical. A lot can be done to diminish spam if we can improve the SMTP protocol. Source address verification and usable certificate services wouldn't take that long to implement and would drastically reduce the quantities of SPAM.
Goals are deceptive - the unaimed arrow never misses.
We've decided that the enemy is the guy sending a mail message to my inbox, which is exactly the wrong enemy, and the hardest to catch for all the reasons EU officials think it won't work (overseas mailers, hijacked systems, etc).
The enemy is the person operating an ongoing fraudulent enterprise which motivates the guy sending the mail to do that. This is also the EASIEST person to catch, since they have to get paid somehow and the money CAN be followed.
If governments were willing to actually police the fraud, the market for spam-senders would shrink dramatically.
What mystifies me is why they're not willing to do this. Is it some BS gung-ho pro-sales "caveat emptor" mentality? I find this hard to believe, since I don't think any of the products I've seen turn up in ~/mail/bogofiltered are even remotely legitimate -- quack potions, stock and money schemes, 419 scams, et al. We're not talking about laundry soap that really doesn't get my whites their whitest, we're talking about products that are prima faciae nonfunctional.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised about this, though, since at least the US government doesn't really care about fraud generally. How long have we been putting up with slamming and cramming? Has anyone gone to jail, or just "admitted no wrongdoing and paid a small fine"? Shit, even the number of culpable execs who deliberately and systematically lied and lined their own pockets on Wall Street who actually will end up in jail is probably countable on my two hands.
Overall I think if the government actually was interested in prosecuting the fraudulent practices and business contained in spam, spam itself would have a serious dent in it.
Instead, they do nothing, letting the spam problem get so far out of hand that the only thing left is to implement heavy regulation of email -- why do I seem to see John Ashcroft smirking in the corner during the otherwise laughable keystone-cops debates on spam?
I can't see how opt in would work in the US. As
soon as you opt in to one company their "business
partners" would start sending you "solicited
emails" too.
Would you not also need some form of personal data
protection legislation?
matfud
...you have no business relatiionships there, no friends there, no people you know moved there. It works on your very own little personal server, but it doesn't deal with the spam problem for an ISP, a corporation, or anything else of magnitude.
Maintaining personal blacklists is pretty easy, but how much time would it take millions and millions of people to all do that? It'd be as bad as the problem it is trying to solve.
Kjella
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