The recent flurry of activity to rid Nevada - and the rest of the nation - of the dreaded spam through state legislation points more to the disarray among those who would block spamming than to any kind of solution.
"Even hundreds of laws against spamming won't stop it," says Stanton McCandlish, webmaster at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's a local ordinance in a global medium." McCandlish backs software solutions, such as anti-spam filters, based on broadly accepted protocols, but even he admits that the timeline for such a solution to junk spams could be remarkably long - from as soon as six months, to as long as five years.
Nevada Senate Majority Leader William Raggio's bill aimed at blocking junk email was introduced last week, and has been widely panned by online activists for being shortsighted. But Raggio argues that the legislation is simply an extension of other state laws limiting junk mail.
"This, in essence does the same thing as the law against unsolicited faxes," Raggio said.
Last year, Nevada passed a junk fax bill, and now the state is seeking to extend the scope to cover email. The legislation would only cover email that originates and ends in Nevada.
But some think government involvement is essential.
The Naderite organization Consumer Project on Technology plans to petition the Federal Trade Commission to seek public comment on a proposal to tag spam. The HTTP tag would alert the email recipient to the message's content - like whether it's an unsolicited advertisement.
"We think it is an appropriate area for the government to consider to protect consumers," says James Love, director of the CPT. "I think if you don't make it mandatory it's not going to work."
Love doesn't put much stock in the Internet's ability to police itself. "There's kind of an infantile, head-in-the-sand, 'we can solve the world's problems because we can write software' attitude, and ultimately its not tenable," he says.
Meanwhile, companies are looking to the courts to curtail spams, but with little applicability. AOL and Prodigy won the limited right to protect their members from Cyber Promotions, a notoriously prolific spammer. But although the court gave both services the right to prevent Cyber Promotions from spamming from within their domains, there's nothing to prevent the company from spamming from the outside. This week, Cyber Promotions resumed spamming AOL members.
But some hope that spamming will simply go away as companies become more Net-savvy.
"Anyone who's been online for a long time knows that it's not an effective marketing process," McCandlish argues. "That's just a dismal business model."
