From Deseret News archives:
Legislation unlikely to slow deluge of spam
Aggressive action is needed, experts saying
But all this togetherness likely won't stop the con artists, hackers and run-of-the-mill spammers who swamp the Internet daily with billions of unwanted e-mails.
Until now, the war on spam has been fought primarily by Internet providers with faulty filtering systems and federal regulators scratching for ammunition to stop spammers. In recent weeks, the anti-spam forces at least look more aggressive.
President Bush signed a national anti-spam bill into law on Tuesday. It authorizes creation of a popular anti-spam registry and provides criminal penalties for faking parts of e-mail, such as sender IDs.
But many consumer advocates don't think much of the legislation, effective Jan. 1. The registry may not be technologically feasible, and the legislation, heavily influenced by mainstream businesses that market products through e-mail, pre-empts some stronger state measures.
"Congress should be ashamed of itself," said Pete Wellborn, an Atlanta attorney who has sued hundreds of spammers.
A coalition of a half-dozen major Internet providers, fierce competitors who aligned last spring to combat spam, is expected to announce its proposals soon. Those likely will include a system to identify bulk e-mailers and certify legitimate ones. That won't cut the volume of spam flooding user inboxes, consumer groups say.
These are catch-up efforts, frenetic reactions to a problem no one foresaw, including Internet companies that were too busy buildIng their networks and gaining market share to recognize the warning signs, industry experts say. No one else saw the signs, either.
"I don't think anybody, even those of us who are professionally paranoid about spam, thought it was going to get this bad this quickly," said John Mozena, co-founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, an advocacy group. "AOL is now blocking more spam than they are delivering legitimate messages. That is a galactic technical and social problem to deal with."
Controlling spam, industry experts and consumer groups say, will take aggressive action and marked improvement on many fronts, including legislation, law enforcement and technology.
Consumers must step up, too, and get comfortable with anti-spam technology. Only about one-third of e-mail users with personal accounts have their own filters, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project study.
"They've got to be looking left and right on the superhighway, doing the things they can do to protect themselves," said Orson Swindle, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, the federal agancy leading the war on spam.
