Background, including CDT policy post: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=spam Incidentally, CDT is hardly a "cyberlibertarian" organization. While not as hostile to business as some groups, it is far from libertarian in its political views (and support for some types of government regulation). My article, which also seems to have prompted this aggrieved response from the DLC: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,44088,00.html -Declan --- ================================== NEW DEMOCRATS ONLINE -- NEW DEM DAILY -- Pithy news and commentary from the DLC. ================================== [ http://www.ndol.org ] 05-JUN-2001 Getting a Label on Spam Legislation to deal with "spam" -- unsolicited commercial email -- has been bouncing around Congress for several years, most notably in legislation by sponsored by Reps. Heather Wilson (R-NM) and Gene Green (D-TX), which passed the House last year. Last month the House Judiciary Committee killed an amendment to this bill, sponsored by New Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), that would have provided a very simple protection for spam recipients. The Schiff Amendment simply provided that every bite of spam carry an identifier on the subject line of the email: the characters ADV, for "advertising." It would apply to all spam, but to spam only; not to political emails or the jokes that Internet users are forever forwarding to everyone in their address books. It's one of the measures the Progressive Policy Institute recommended in a November, 1999 report, "How to Can Spam." But while the untimely death of the Schiff amendment drew little attention, cyberlibertarians are aflame over a provision that remains in the bill: an amendment by Rep. Melissa Hart (R-PA) that requires specific labeling for pornographic spam so that unwilling viewers or parents can either delete it or create a filter to keep it from landing like a bag of rotten potatoes on the home PC screen. Today, porno-spammers often use tricky and misleading subject lines like "Sorry I missed your call," or "Haven't heard from you in a while," aimed at misleading recipients into opening their nasty little surprise. A cyberlibertarian group called the Center for Democracy and Technology views this mild and reasonable labeling requirement as a serious threat to the Constitution, calling the label "forced speech" which is "as offensive to the Constitution as forced silence." Since similar or even greater restrictions already apply to physical mail with sexual content, the real cyberlibertarian case lies in the mistaken impression that the Internet is inherently a Wild West medium where no rules should ever apply. That's exactly the kind of thinking that could quickly make the Internet an inhospitable zone of abusive conduct that many current or potential users will not want to enter. Since the argument against the Hart Amendment relies heavily on opposition to regulation of content on the Internet, cyberlibertarians should logically support the Schiff Amendment as an alternative: it does not distinguish between different types of commercial messages, and applies a strictly descriptive subject-line label that calls it what it is: advertising. Rep. Schiff is thinking about introducing his spam labeling bill as free-standing legislation. Every reasonable party to the debate should be able to support it. Without labels, Internet users will continue to be force-fed spam for years -- or will get sick of it and rely on other ways to communicate. Related Material: "E-Mail Spam Labeling: Why the Cyberlibertarians Have It Wrong," by Shane Ham, PPI Front & Center, June 4, 2001: http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=107&subsecid=126&contentid=3422 "How to Can Spam: Legislative Solutions to the Problem Of Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail," by Randolph H. Court and Robert D. Atkinson, PPI Policy Briefing, November 1999: http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?contentid=1349&knlgAreaID=107&subsecid=126 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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