Spam - 21: Anti-Spam Legislation, Eventually?
Dateline 01/11/99
  
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"And so castles made of sand
fall in the sea
eventually"
Jimi Hendrix
Castles Made Of Sand
1999 will be the year that spam became regulated by law; maybe.
Self? Regulation
In its relatively short history (of course most people will argue this is still way too long), spam had an interesting effect on the online community.
When the sporadically appearing commercial emails started to become a flood of spam clogging servers and users about three years ago, the Net was all against any regulation. "Self regulation was the big credo and state intervention was downright apocalyptic.
For most aspects of the Internet this is still true, true with necessity. But unsolicited bulk email is different.
Spam has soon been identified as a major and expensive nuisance (and possible show stopper for the Internet with its e-business opportunities). Consequently, self-regulation was attempted. Many efforts were made, among them the Realtime Blackhole List, releases of mail servers with anti-spam measures, complaining to spammers' ISPs, or as a last resort plain filtering.
Not that they had no effect at all; thus they still exist and are still "effective", of course. But they did not succeed in freeing the ordinary user (ie any user) from the daily dose (German "Dose" means "can", BTW) of spam.
Legislation
Thus, the call for legislation has become louder and louder.
Pressure groups like the Coalition Against Commercial Email (CAUCE) formed and joined large ISPs like AOL that lose considerable amounts of money due to spam clogging their servers.
The result (not necessarily the direct result of any specific "pressure" other than the general ambiance) were several legislative initiatives on both the state and the national level, some better, some worse.
While some state laws are in effect by now their reach is rather limited. This also applies to nationwide laws, but they should nevertheless have a major impact on spammers. To date no laws have been passed, however (here "better late than sorry" might apply).
House Commerce Committee Agenda
There are strong signs that this may change in 1999. The strongest is the legislative agenda of the House Commerce Committee.
In a speech highlighting important points of the agenda chairman Representative Tom Bliley (R-VA) said that he "will work with legislators and the private sector to resolve the problem of computer junk mail. [...] We must protect First Amendment rights while unclogging cyberspace."
It will be interesting to see how they want to achieve this sublime goal. We'll know early enough; hopefully.
Interestingly, Bliley comes from Virginia. Virginia is also the state of AOL. Virginia is also the state that has introduced the first law that would criminalize spam.
Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore and Bliley are going to co-host a "world-wide summit on the Internet" this year. It will be hard not to tackle spam there.
