Governments Finally Attack Spam

Earlier this week, Virginia enacted a law imposing harsh felony penalties against those who use fraudulent practices to send bulk e-mail to or from the state, according to the New York Times. Virginia is headquarters for a number of major Internet providers, including America Online, the nation’s largest.

After ignoring anti-spam bills introduced in the last four years, Congress is now expected to give serious consideration to several new proposals. And many anti-spam proposals are being debated this week in a three-day forum on spam in Washington, organized by the Federal Trade Commission.

In early April, Sens. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced a bill that would require senders to label unsolicited commercial e-mail and ban them from falsifying the sender’s name or the subject.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., also introduced a bill intended to impose criminal penalties on senders who repeatedly violate the law and to create a national registry of people who do not want to receive spam.

Finally, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., plans to introduce a bill that would require bulk spam to be labeled with “ADV” in the subject line. The bill also would carry out a proposal by Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig forcing senders of spam to pay computer users a bounty for reporting it.

Spam represents nearly half of all e-mail sent, according to estimates by the Internet industry. Two-thirds of spam is sent with either false addresses or a misleading subject matter, according to a report the FTC issued this week.

Indeed, anger over spam from computer users is even causing some in the industry to support federal legislation, if only to avoid having to deal with a patchwork of state anti-spam laws, according to the Times. More than two dozen states have anti-spam laws, but enforcement problems and low penalties have made many of the laws ineffective.

“We need a single strong national policy to deal with spam so that no one can play the states off against each other," said Shane Ham, a senior analyst who studies anti-spam legislation for Progressive Policy Institute.