The chairman of a US Senate committee called for more
federal enforcement of a new antispam law amid reports that the
amount of spam sent to US consumers may be rising since the law
went into effect in January.
Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science
and Transportation Committee, questioned why the US Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) had not focused on the companies using spammers to
advertise their products while that agency attempts to enforce the
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing
(Can-Spam) Act.
The FTC and federal law enforcement officials brought Can-Spam
and other charges against two alleged spamming companies in late
April, but McCain urged the FTC and the FBI to step up their
enforcement efforts against spammers, including child pornography
spammers, during a hearing on the effectiveness of Can-Spam.
"If the FTC can't find the spammers, it should do the next best
thing: go after the businesses that knowingly hire spammers to
promote their goods and services," said McCain.
"At a minimum, the FTC could put thousands of businesses - many
of them online pornography retailers - on notice that using
anonymous spam is an illegal means of driving consumer traffic to
their websites."
But bulk e-mailers trying to comply with the law - by using
their own IP (Internet Protocol) addresses instead of forging
headers, and by including their company names and postal addresses
in the text of the e-mail - are being punished by ISPs such
as America Online, said Ronald Scelson, president of
MicroEvolutions.com, a bulk e-mail company based in Texas.
Scelson's company has stopped using common spamming techniques
to comply with Can-Spam, but AOL and other ISPs are still blocking
his company's e-mail, Scelson said.
Scelson told the committee he could go back to using forged
headers and defeat most spam filters. "Does the government want us
to mail legal or not?" Scelson asked. "As long as we're doing it
the right way and we're going to get blocked, interfered with and
shut down, people are going to go around it."
While senators called for more enforcement of Can-Spam,
representatives of the FTC and FBI said their agencies are working
hard to combat spam. The FTC is still working on some rules related
to Can-Spam, and promised it would deliver a plan for a national
do-not-e-mail registry by Can-Spam's 16 June deadline. An FTC rule
requiring sexually explicit e-mails to be labelled went into
effect last week.
Representatives of spam-filtering service Postini and the
Consumers Union told the committee that the amount of unsolicited
commercial e-mail continues to rise after Can-Spam became law.
Postini, which processes about 1.3 billion e-mails a week, has seen
the percentage of spam in that e-mail processed increase from 78%
to 83% since the law went into effect.
Still, Can-Spam was a positive step in fighting spam because it
set the ground rules for what is acceptable behavior, said Shinya
Akamine, president and chief executive officer of Postini, adding
that the increase in the amount of spam may have been higher
without the law.
Akamine and Hans Peter Brondmo, senior vice president of e-mail
marketing vendor Digital Impact, disagreed on what technological
measures can be effective in blocking spam. Postini is blocking
close to 99% of its customers' spam, Akamine said, but Brondmo said
the only way to get rid of spam is to adopt sender-authentication
protocols proposed by large ISPs including Microsoft and AOL.
AOLannounced during the hearing that the amount of spam e-mail
hitting its subscribers' in-boxes declined by between 20% to 30%
in the past year, through a variety of spam-fighting initiatives.
Can-Spam helped AOL and other ISPs sue hundreds of spammers in
early March, said Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of America Online and
president of the AOL Core Service.
Grant Gross writes for IDG News
Service