Karlin Lillington
California may this week give Internet service providers (ISPs) the strongest legal weapon yet in the battle against “spam” – the unsolicited mass e-mail advertisements detested by Internet users – allowing them to sue for $25 000 in damages a day. But in an odd political twist, the United States federal government is set to pass its own legislation that would invalidate the law later this year.
The California Bill would shift spam into the realm of contract law, allowing ISPs to sue spammers who haven’t received explicit permission to send bulk e-mail through their systems. The Bill is unusual in that it doesn’t police spam but attempts to let economic pressures regulate it, says John Cusey, legislative aide to the Bill’s co-sponsor, state legislator Gary Miller. Internet users might get a discount on their accounts in exchange for accepting some spam, he says, or users could opt to move to ISPs who ban spam entirely.
“The goal is not to have police officers after spam,” says Cusey. “Instead, we’d set up the market to go after spammers.”
Spam typically flogs get-rich-quick schemes or pornography sites. Sent out in bulk mailings of up to millions of individual messages, spam can swamp computer networks, and industry analysts estimate it costs millions of rands in lost productivity to remove it.
Administrators at Usenet, a global Internet discussion forum that offers an easy mass audience for spammers, insist spam would bring their network to a halt if volunteers didn’t weed it out daily, while ISPs say spam constitutes up to 30% of their Internet traffic.
“We have five full-time people who just scan for spam,” says Steve Dougherty, director of Internet operations for California-based ISP EarthLink. “We put barriers and walls and traps up and then [spammers] will change their modus operandi.”
Nonetheless, EarthLink established an initial legal bulwark against spam when it won a $2-million settlement last March against one of the most gleeful spammers, Sanford “Spamford” Wallace of Cyber Promotions.
Spam has been a thorny issue in a country that legally guarantees freedom of speech and prefers industry self-regulation to legislation. Most successful prosecutions against spammers, including EarthLink’s, have used property laws to circumvent such issues – a computer is seen as private property, and thus spam illegally occupies it.
US lawmakers accept that the budding e-commerce market could be compromised by network overload. Only two states have spam laws, and Congress is debating several federal proposals.
One, which has already passed several committee hearings but is widely opposed by Net industry advocates, would legalise spam as long as spammers identified their e-mail as advertisements in the body of the message. The proposal would also override any state spam law passed after July 1, making the California Bill moot.
John Mozena, co-founder of the lobby group Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, which would like to see the California Bill as a model for federal legislation, says they oppose the proposed federal bill because tagging messages as advertisements puts the burden of filtering spam on the ISPs and end users.
In the midst of such hostility, spam achieved one small victory last week, receiving linguistic legitimacy from the New Oxford Dictionary of English. It’s defined as “irrelevant Internet messages sent to a large number of people”.