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FTC says federal spam law has worked
Posted by: Tweaker
Date added: 22:42, 20th December 2005 GMT
Source: C/NET News
About 70 percent of the world's e-mail messages continue to be spam. But federal officials said Tuesday that the number is leveling off and that shows a law enacted two years ago is working.
At a press conference here, the Federal Trade Commission released a report (click here for PDF) delivered last week to Congress that said the so-called Can-Spam Act is "effective in providing protection for consumers."
Can-Spam has permitted the agency to pursue lawsuits against spammers and has spurred adoption of "best practices" for commercial e-mail, such as including an "opt out" link and the sender's postal address in any unsolicited message, said Lydia Parnes, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.
What remains unclear, however, is how effective the law has been. Statistics compiled by antispam companies show that the total number of junk e-mail messages has leaped 62 percent in the last year. At the same time, filtering technology has dramatically improved, which could account for in-boxes not completely overflowing.
Some critics of Can-Spam, which requires an opt-out approach rather than a stricter "opt in" standard, have even suggested that the law may have increased the amount of junk e-mail. That's because Congress intentionally zapped tougher state laws such as one in California that had required recipients to opt in to commercial mailing lists.
The FTC's Parnes acknowledged that it was problematic to attribute a cause-and-effect relationship to the 2003 law. "I think it's difficult to parse out the effectiveness of the law versus the technological advances in reducing spam," she said.
Parnes also warned that the nature of spam content appears to be growing increasingly malicious, and spammers continue to evade law enforcement by registering with domain name registrars under false names. The FTC encouraged improvements in spam-busting technology and in "domain-level authentication," as well as a continued effort to educate consumers about the Web bane.
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