Australia is attempting to outlaw what its minister for communications calls ”the mosquitoes of the internet” — spam.
Under new laws to be introduced into the country’s Parliament later this year, email users will be able to ”opt in” to receive unsolicited commercial emails: so that Australians should not receive junk mail unless they specifically ask for it. The Australian communications authority (ACA) will be able to fine spammers who break the rules.
The bill also bans the distribution and use of email harvesting and list-generating software, which are the main tools spammers use to create extensive lists of email addresses to bombard with messages.
All commercial messages will have to include full details of the sender’s name and physical address, as well as an unsubscribe option allowing recipients to stop any further messages.
Richard Alston, Australia’s minister for communications, information technology and the arts, said the Australian government is ”committed to taking a strong stand against spam”.
”Spam is a menace to home and business email users and is a major scourge of productivity. Spam emails are the mosquitoes of the internet – numerous, annoying and often carrying nasty viruses,” he said.
Not everyone in Australia is convinced that the legislation will work. The Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA) opposes the idea of an opt-in regime, claiming it may affect what it calls ”legitimate email marketing” by its members. It also argues that the legal measures simply do not work against spam, which disregards geographic borders.
The head of the ADMA, Rob Edwards, said earlier this year: ”Many spammers operate outside Australia and are beyond any laws we could create. The only solution that applies is a technology solution because the law will only apply to those who adhere to it.”
The ACA has said the ADMA and other stakeholders will be consulted on the new laws.
The counterargument is that nations pioneering opt-in systems could create a snowball effect, forcing other countries to follow suit and eventually stamping out the global spam problem.
As Josh Rowe, Australia’s representative at the Asia-Pacific Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email forum, told the Sydney Morning Herald: ”The more countries that put in this kind of opt-in legislation, where people have to give permission to receive email, the more it pushes out countries who don’t have that legislation and it kind of puts them into the third world of the internet.”
While Alston admits that there is ”no silver bullet” against spam, the government hopes that the laws will put Australia at the forefront of international anti-spam efforts.
The European Union (EU) will soon be joining Australia in bringing in an ”opt-in” system. The EU directive, which comes into force at the end of October, will allow consumers to seek damages from spammers. Several EU members, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, and Italy have already put the directive’s anti-spam measures in place.
However, America appears to be heading in the opposite direction. The US Congress is considering a raft of Bills proposing a national ”opt-out” system: in other words, Americans will continue to suffer from a plague of commercial messages unless they specifically ask not to. Anti-spam campaigners view these plans as utterly counterproductive, as they effectively legalise spammers’ activity.
The anti-spam group the Spamhaus Project has condemned Congress for threatening to unleash ”the spamming power of 23 million American small businesses on to an internet which already can not cope with the billions of unsolicited bulk mailings sent by just 200 current businesses”. Spamhaus estimates that 90% of all spam received by European email users comes from the US. – Guardian Unlimited Â