The European Union promised action on Tuesday to curb unsolicited bulk e-mails in a new sign of international determination to stop ”spam” messages.
EU telecommunications ministers meeting in Brussels promised to speed up slow implementation of an EU-wide law agreed two years ago banning commercial spam, which experts say now accounts for more than half of all e-mails.
”We have agreed next steps in the national and international fight against spam in order to prevent it undermining consumer and business confidence,” EU information society commissioner Erkki Liikanen said in a statement.
”There are still things to be done, but we have moved a further step in the right direction,” he said.
The EU ministers said they would step up cooperation among their governments, taking note that spam is a cross-border problem that requires international solutions.
The EU notably wants companies to solicit the consent of recipients before sending them bulk e-mail, in a legal requirement called the ”opt-in” condition.
Campaigners want governments to go further and enable users to ”opt out” of receiving any spam at all, by registering on a central database.
The EU promises of action come after the United States Congress agreed a law in November designed to rein in the spammers.
Without banning unsolicited e-mail, the law enables internet users to have their e-mail addresses removed from mailing lists and also calls for heavy fines and prison terms for those sending messages of a fraudulent or pornographic nature without warning recipients first.
But the so-called ”CAN-SPAM Act” — which stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act — has had little effect since going into effect on January 1, computer experts say.
E-mail security firm Postini said spam accounted for 79% of all the US e-mail it processed in January, compared with 80% in December.
The cost of spam for businesses and ordinary users is meanwhile rising.
A recent EU study estimated that the worldwide cost to internet subscribers of spam is about €10-billion a year, not least because of hours lost deleting such messages from e-mail in-boxes.
Bill Gates, chairperson of the world’s biggest software firm, Microsoft, has promised to eradicate the spam problem within two years.
Last month Microsoft announced a series of plans and industry partnerships to improve internet security and to curb spam with a system to verify the identities of e-mail senders.
But according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which last month co-organised the EU’s first conference on the problem, governments need to act together.
”We need a coordinated international drive to maintain consumer and business confidence in the Internet,” OECD deputy secretary general Herwig Schloegl told the seminar in early February.
The conference coincided with the infection of more than one million computers around the world by the Mydoom e-mail worm, which underlined the vulnerability of IT systems to malicious spam. — Sapa-AFP