A US Senate bill that would clamp down on one consumer outrage -- long-distance phone companies' occasional practice of "slamming" customers, or switching them from one carrier to another without consent -- has been passed with a provision that aims to ease an online migraine -- spam.
The bill, approved Tuesday by a vote of 99-0, includes an amendment by Senators Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Robert Torricelli (D-New Jersey) that aims to throttle junk email by making it illegal to falsify the origins of a message. But anti-spam activists denounced the bill, declaring it a victory for spammers.
The bill provides for civil penalties up to US$15,000 for those who send forged email messages. The bill also requires spammers to include a notice telling recipients how to get off the mailing list.
Murkowski and Torricelli have been working on the issue since last year. In addition to easing the plight of online denizens bombarded with garbage messages advertising a panoply of pornography, get-rich-quick schemes, too-cheap-to-be-true software, and other come-ons, the Alaskan senator also said, tongue in cheek, he hoped to rectify a slander.
"Among those who are regular email users, (junk email) is known as spam, which I believe is an insult to the Hormel Corporation."
Anti-spam activists aren't thrilled with the Murkowski-Torricelli product. The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, among others, expressed dismay that the legislation attacks forged data but not the practice of spamming itself.
"This amendment is worse than maintaining the status quo," said John Mozena, coalition cofounder. "It leaves no power in the hands of users. Only ISPs and the Federal Trade Commission may take action against spammers, so users are left hanging."
Mozena said the senators had asked the coalition for its input on the amendment, but that those criticisms fell on deaf ears.
"We said it was a bad idea, and they ignored us," Mozena said. "It has to be a pro-marketing agenda; no one else wins under this."
Mozena said that the amendments were likely influenced by lobbying from the Direct Marketing Association. While not currently involved in spam, Mozena said the association is likely hedging its bets.
"Based on conversations we have had, [the Direct Marketing Association] is concerned that if random junk spam email is eliminated, that in the next few years their organization will become obsolete," he said.
"If they and their members can't use junk email, then as more and more communication takes place on the Net, and they can't use the Net that way, then they see themselves becoming dinosaurs."
George Nemeyer, spokesman for the Internet Service Providers' Coalition, condemned the amendment, saying that the language of today's bill has been watered down from that of a previous version, S.771. That draft would have required spammers to place a keyword such as "advertisement" in a message header, so that it might more easily be filtered.
"It is pretty abysmal," said Nemeyer. "The amendment totally falls flat with respect to addressing this whole issue which is the cost shifting [where recipients pay the costs of spam, not the sender]," he said.
But Joe Keeley, a Murkowski legislative aide, said that the "advertisement" keyword stipulation had been dropped from the bill because of concerns voiced by free-speech activists. He denied that the Direct Marketing Association had played any role in the process.
Keely said that today's amendments were only intended as a stopgap measure.
"It was not our intent to do this as a final solution [to spam], but only as an interim step," Keely said. "Unfortunately, with time running out in the Senate and the House, it was simply a matter of this bill, or quite possibly nothing."
