From Georgetown University's The Hoya:
The government’s first attempt at national e-mail legislation, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, is fundamentally flawed because it merely defines criteria that, if followed, make sending spam legal. Some critics of the law have therefore dubbed it “You CAN SPAM.”
The state of Washington was the first to prosecute a violation of an anti-spam law, which was passed back in 1998. The concise statute simply forbids “[containing] false or misleading information in the subject line” and “using a third-party’s Internet domain name” to send e-mail without their permission.
The Washington state law provides an excellent framework for making spam illegal, and the national government should seriously consider passing similar legislation that prohibits spam from being sent.
Unfortunately, spammers have become unbelievably advanced in their trade. Prosecuting cases here and there under a national law will be helpful and necessary, but doing so will not come close to actually ending spam.
According to FTC reports to Congress, proposed common-sense solutions like a “Do Not Spam Registry” and mandatory labeling of commercial e-mail would actually end up resulting in an increase of junk e-mail. Because spamming techniques make it extraordinarily hard to actually track down individual scammers, a “do not spam” list would essentially end up as a directory of millions of e-mail addresses confirmed as active.
Read the whole thing.
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