President Bush yesterday signed his country's first federal anti-spam law. With effect from 1st January, it establishes a framework of administrative, civil, and criminal tools to tackle unsolicited commercial e-mail. But critics say it's narrow and weak.
The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, a name contrived for the acronym CAN-SPAM, has taken six years of drafting, debate and compromise to reach the statute books.
The CAN-SPAM Act does not actually can spam. There is no ban on sending unsolicited commercial e-mail or text messages. Instead, it requires that spam sent to consumers includes a means of opting-out of the mailing list used by the sender.
The Act also provides for a national Do-Not-Spam list, bans the sending of fraudulent e-mails or unmarked sexually oriented e-mails, and provides for civil and criminal sanctions for those spammers who breach the rules. The penalties may amount to fines of $6 million and five years in prison in the most severe cases.
But, unlike some more stringent state anti-spam laws, the CAN-SPAM Act will not permit individuals to take action themselves. This role is to be left only to the usual law enforcement agencies.
Nor does the Act prohibit the sending of non-fraudulent e-mails. And this, say the critics, means that the problem of spam will not be reduced. After all, are those sending fraudulent or deceptively titled e-mails likely to be concerned about the legalities of their actions?
And those commercial e-mailers who are likely to take note of the new Act - millions of businesses throughout the US - are the very companies that can still send commercial e-mail, provided they honour requests from consumers to opt-out.
When Congress approved the CAN-SPAM Act last month, the US Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (CAUCE) commented, "This legislation fails the most fundamental test of any anti-spam law, in that it neglects to actually tell any marketers not to spam."
Nevertheless, the new Act has been welcomed by some. America Online said in a statement:
"With this new law, Congress has now placed state-of-the-art enforcement tools into federal law when it comes to penalising the kingpin spammers for their deceitful and fraudulent actions. Combined with enforcement under state anti-spam laws, as well as damages lawsuits by ISPs, we hope to turn the tide against 'outlaw' spammers - pushing them into a smaller and smaller corner from which there is no escape."