Hotmail, the Microsoft subsidiary and free email service provider, has picked a horse to back in the legislative stampede to stem the flood of unsolicited commercial email now flooding Internet users' in-boxes. But both Hotmail and backers of the bill it has chosen to support say the endorsement may be too little, too late.
Monday morning, Hotmail declared its support for HR1748, the so-called "Netizen's Protection Act." Sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-New Jersey), HR 1748 would extend a 1991 law prohibiting junk faxing, and boasts support from the Internet Service Providers Consortium, as well as other smaller ISPs. The Smith bill gives consumers the right to sue spammers for each unwanted piece of email they receive and packs a hefty compensatory wallop: The suggested fine is US$500 per spam, and if the courts find that a spammer "willfully" or "knowingly" violated the law, damages triple.
But the bill lost steam last month with the Senate passage of an anti-spamming bill (S 1618) aimed at abusive telecom marketing practices. Sponsored by Senators Robert Torricelli (D-New Jersey) and Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska), the amendment requires bulk emailers to identify themselves and honor remove requests. Internet consumer advocates insist that rather than stem the spam tide, the bill actually encourages it.
"I would have said the bill had a good chance of passage before [Murkowski and Torricelli] introduced their end-around," says Randy Delucchi, Hotmail's director of customer support and a well-known anti-spam crusader. "Now I'm not so sure."
And while longtime supporters of the Netizen's Protection Act say they are happy to have Hotmail's backing, they fear the support may have come too late. "The bill might not have much of a chance this session," admits John Morenza of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Email.
Morenza believes that the hold-up on spam has two tap roots: One, Congress' lingering ignorance about the Internet, and two, its fear of inadvertently blundering into a previously unrecognized political hotbed.
"I think the [Communications Decency Act] haunts Congress," he says. "They passed a law that was sold to them as a noncontroversial effort to protect children, then they had all these crazy people from the Internet community calling, faxing ... and emailing them. They're afraid of getting burned again."
According to testimony from leaders of the Internet and telecom industries, however, a sound legislative solution to spam can't come soon enough.
Speaking before a House subcommittee on telecommunications, trade, and consumer protection last week, Barbara Dooley, the executive director of the Commercial Internet Exchange Association -- a trade group that represents Internet service providers and other firms -- underscored the negative effect of spam. Citing preliminary results of an international survey of ISPs, Dooley reported that 94 percent of respondents claimed spam irritates their subscribers, 79.9 percent said unsolicited commercial email slows system performance, 75.9 percent stated that it increases operating costs, and 33.7 percent said spam creates system outages. More than half (58.5 percent) said it affected their business on a daily basis.
But as bad as the spam problem is, anti-spam advocates fear that Congress is poised to make things even worse. Speaking at last week's hearing, Riley Murphy, executive vice president and general counsel for e.spire Communications, an integrated communications provider, noted that HR 3888 -- the House version of the Senate anti-slamming bill -- "has the potential to permit spammers the leeway to flood our network, and ultimately the end user, with unwanted and very costly junk email."
To avoid that outcome, anti-spammers are encouraging congress to act cautiously. "Our tactic has been, 'Look, we don't have to pass anything this session,'" says CAUCE's Morenza. "We'd rather see no law than a bad law."
Hotmail's Delucchi agrees. "If it was a choice between the [Murkowski/Torricelli] rider and nothing," he says, "I'd take nothing."
