A fourth U.S. lawmaker threw her hat into the anti-spam ring this week, announcing planned legislation to combat the increasingly costly scourge of unsolicited e-mail. Previously opposed to measures limiting Internet use, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said Wednesday that she will introduce a bill that creates a bounty for identifying spammers.
The question surrounding the prospect of looming federal anti-spam regulation is not "if", but "how much?" Even lawmakers once resistant to wading into Internet regulation, such as Lofgren, are expressing the need to act quickly before the problem of spam outweighs the benefit of e-mail.
However, approaches to mitigating the problem vary considerably. At one end of the spectrum is a light-touch tactic endorsed by Lofgren, whose "Reduce Spam Act" would require all commercial e-mail to display the letters "ADV" in the subject line, the congresswoman said Wednesday at the Federal Trade Commission's Spam Forum in Washington.
Lofgren's measure, which she will introduce later this week, would also authorize the FTC to pay 20 percent of fines collected in prosecutions to individuals who identify spammers. Recognizing that district attorneys and U.S. attorneys are unlikely to have abundant resources to pursue spam, Lofgren said her measure would create a bounty, "unleashing the 18-year-olds to go after the spammers."
On the other end of the spectrum is an initiative announced earlier this week by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., which would create a "no-spam" registry, similar to the FTC's "do-not-call list," and authorize jail time up to two years for serious, repeat spammers.
"I would be very, very surprised if we didn't pass a comprehensive anti-spamming bill this session," Schumer said Wednesday at the FTC forum.
A more moderate approach is embodied in a bill sponsored by Sens. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., which the senators first introduced last year and re-introduced earlier this month. Known as the "CAN-SPAM" bill, the Burns/Wyden measure won the support of the Senate Commerce Committee in the last session but did not make it to a vote on the Senate floor. The bill would require that all unsolicited marketing e-mail contain a valid return address and an accurate subject heading, and senders would be banned from sending further messages once a consumer asked them to stop.
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