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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Murkowski anti-spam bill could be a problem for ISPs
No, this isn't a rant about spam. It's about a misguided anti-spam bill that puts potentially onerous rules on every ISP in the country. Sen. Frank Murkowski of Alaska filed a bill earlier this week that's intended to solve the spam problem. His intentions are clearly good, and based on his press release, he seems to understand many of the issues, but his bill is very unfortunate. It says: * Commercial e-mail must be tagged with "advertisement" * All ISPs must provide tag filtering on inbound mail * Commercial e-mail must provide a real return address, and accept remove requests. They have 48 hours to act on a remove request. * The FTC can discipline misbehaving ISPs. * Various penalties for unsigned ads, for ISPs that don't provide filtering, for spammers who continue to send ads after receiving a remove. There's a press release and a full copy of the bill on the senator's web site at http://www.senate.gov/~murkowski/press/EMail052197.html Seems to me that if this were enacted into law, it'd be bad news for ISPs, since the volume of spam would increase (since it'd be officially legal) and ISPs would have to provide filtering on mountains of inbound spam. And, of course, opt-out lists don't work. There's a separate bill proposed by Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey which extends the junk fax ban to unsolicited commercial e-mail and says nothing about ISPs. The ISP/C endorses the Smith bill in principle. People say they've been talking to Murkowski, he's amenable to argument and will probably revise his bill next week. If you think this bill would affect your business (he's a pro-business conservative Republican, after all), it's worth a phone call. Regards, John Levine, [email protected], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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