New law says you 'can' spam
Summary
Topics
COMMENTARY--After six years of wrangling over legislative ways to stop spam, Congress was still faced with a fundamental choice: Give consumers control over the growing flood of unwanted spam e-mail that fills their in-boxes, or give in to the powerful advertising and marketing industries who want to be the ones filling consumer in-boxes.In the end, consumers lost.
The Can-Spam Act, signed into law Tuesday, is being touted as relief for the millions of consumers
Get Up to Speed on...
Enterprise security
Get the latest headlines and
company-specific news in our
expanded GUTS section.
Can-Spam sets forth various dos and don'ts for the spammer who aspires tobe legitimate. Do put your company's name and street address in the body of youradvertisement. Don't use a fake return address. Do give people a method by whichthey can opt out of messages about your company's latest clearance sale on earth-moving equipment. Don't bother to ask whether the millions of people you aree-mailing could possibly even need your products in the first place.
This law is a result of the direct-marketing lobby's success in convincing Congress to redefine the spam problem as being about dishonesty rather than the negative effects of massive volumes of unwanted e-mail. Marketers argued that because most of the spam in consumer in-boxes is filled with fake headers,forged return addresses, and bogus opt-out links, outlawing those practices willmake the "bad" spam go away and make room for "good" e-mail from legitimatecompanies.
Can-Spam sets forth various dos and don'ts for the spammer who aspires to be legitimate.
Yet marketers remain desperate to get into consumers' e-mail in-boxes, soswapping "bad" spam for "good" spam is what the Can-Spam Act is all about.Provided that each e-mail is truthful and provides an opt-out process, the lawgrants every marketer one free shot at e-mailing every American with a workinge-mail address. The Direct Marketing Association calls this getting "one bite at the apple."
Unfortunately, the apple isn't that large, and marketers have very big mouths.
The danger in providing one bite to every would-be e-mail marketer is that whenyou look at the numbers, they foretell disaster. The U.S. Small BusinessAdministration estimates that there are about 25 million small businesses inthis country. If only 1 percent of those businesses sends a single legitimate e-mail message bearing an opt-out feature to every American, we will average more than 650unwanted e-mails per day.
Provided that each e-mail is truthful and provides an opt-out process, the law grants every marketer one free shot at e-mailing every American with a working e-mail address...when you look at the numbers, they foretell disaster.
Unburdened by fears of legalliability for spamming, it is only a matter of time before increasing numbers oflegitimate marketers turn to unsolicited e-mail as a low-cost alternative tosending out credit card offers and coupons for laundry detergent.
The direct marketing industry believes that the Can-Spam Act is a great victory.(By the way, so do several of the world's most prolific spammers.) But I believethat even legitimate marketers will soon come to realize what many have longfeared: An unfettered right to spam will continue to erode the usefulness ofe-mail as a communications tool.
The best we can hope for is that the Can-Spam Act will have little effect on thespam problem, and the world will continue to seek other methods of controllingthe flood of junk e-mail. Meanwhile, as we enter this election season, when ourcongressional representatives tell us how they acted decisively to solve theproblem of deceptive spam, we can all take comfort in knowing that deception inpolitical campaigns is still very much legal.
biography
Ray Everett-Church is chief privacy officer for the antispam technology and consulting firm ePrivacy Group and serves as counsel to the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.
Talkback - Tell Us What You Think
The best of ZDNet, delivered
ZDNet Newsletters
Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox
Facebook Activity
