Internet Community's Anti-Spam Rights

Reader says that a community right to send and receive e-mail outweighs any "free speech" rights owned by spammers or Microsoft or AOL or MSN.

[Response to FTC Spam Forum Dispatch from May 5, 2003.]

[May 8, 2003]

Dear Editors:

The wrong group of people are heading the FTC conference in my opinion. The right group was in Baltimore two weeks ago at ISPCon (yes, I was there all the way from Washington State).

I serve on the board of WAISP (Washington Association of Internet Service Providers) and WAISP helped author Washington State's anti Spam law back 1998. I travel to Olympia at least once a year to testify against Spam (twice this year so far). We want more teeth in the existing law and want to copy what Virginia has done. Kudos to them!

It sure seems to me that the states are doing what the people want and the feds are doing what the spammers want. Something is very wrong with this picture.

Defining spam
Many of the people at the FTC summit would be spammers by CAUCE's definition of spam: Bulk + unsolicited = SPAM.

Most ISPs agree with CAUCE's definition. AOL and MSN want to be allowed to send their own solicitations, but want to stop others.

In Washington State, we blocked a law proposed by Microsoft that in essence allowed Microsoft to spam and no one else. Our Attorney General took real exception to this! And this law was very cleverly disguised as a law to add ADV: to the subject line of commercial e-mail. I want someone to please explain how adding ADV: to a subject line of an e-mail is going to slow down spam?

Just take my favorite example (not my own). According to the US Chamber of Commerce, there are 10 million businesses in the US. If every business in the US sent just 1 unsolicited bulk e-mail per year, we would get over 27,000 e-mails per day.

Double opt-in will help
I admit, this example is extreme. But the problem is extreme. Double opt-in is the only way to keep e-mail a legitimate form of communication. The DMA will not like it, but 5 years ago we could not get the DMA to even admit spam was a threat. Now they are claiming it costs them money. Duh!

Topica.com is moving to a double opt-in model and says it is a huge success and wants to be 100 percent some day (I encouraged their CEO last week to set a date like the end of this year). Why is it so hard for others to see this? This method works well for everyone involved. Marketers get the message to people that actually want to read it. ISP's do not have to pass as much traffic for bounces and complaints. Recipients get stuff they actually want.

Spam has increased about 25 percent from March 2003 to April 2003 and over 700 percent from the year before. This drastic problem is only going to be solved by drastic measures. And someone is not going to be happy about it. But isn't this an example of the "needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few"?

Regards,

Sheldon Koehler, Owner/Partner
Ten Forward Communications