More Defiant than Canned Meat:
Consumers Fight Back Against SPAM
Electronic commerce is a broad term, covering a wide
range of commercial activities through World Wide Web trading partners.
Until recently, electronic interactions have been the privilege of
large companies that had the knowledge, technology and sufficient
capital to invest in an electronic infrastructure that supports electronic
business transactions (1). With the increase of personal computers
and individual Internet access, problems of regulated advertising
have irritated regular email users-to say the least.
In 1998, Senator Murkowski, Alaska, proposed a Truth
in Advertising provision. The bill simply required commercial e-mailers
to identify who they were, their addresses, and their telephone numbers
when sending out emails for their products. The provision to target
the reduction of SPAM mail was included based on the millions of junk
e-mails sent out with phony e-mail addresses that made it impossible
for citizens (namely of Senator Murkowski's Alaska where long-distance
email access charges accumulate) to request that the sender stop cluttering
their e-mail boxes (2). The provision further required that a junk
e-mailer must honor the request of an individual who asks that his
or her name be deleted from the mailing list permanently.
The amendment permitted the Federal Trade Commission,
the State Attorneys General, and Internet service providers to protect
consumers from Internet junk e-mail by allowing them to sue those
junk e-mailers who fail to identify themselves properly or refuse
to remove a person's name from a mailing list (3).
In July of 2002, one company said that the volume of
spam it encounters has almost tripled in the last nine months. The
company adds that 12 to 15 percent of total e-mail traffic is spam;
a year ago, that figure was closer to 7 percent, recording 140,000
spam attacks a day, each potentially involving thousands of messages,
if not millions. No one knows precisely why spamming has increased
so much. One reason may be that it is an inexpensive form of marketing
favored in a slumping economy (4).
Ultimately, Murkowski's bill passed, and today there
are many ways to deal with spam. You can ignore it and let your end
users sift through their e-mail and delete the junk themselves. You
can filter it through homegrown or commercial databases of known spamming
sites, keywords, and other spam indicators. You can sign on with a
black hole service, which completely blocks any e-mail coming from
offending domains. You can complain to your ISP and demand they kick
the spammer off the network. Last but not least, you can sue (5).
Last
updated Nov. 15, 2002 