The US government has done things to try to curb the problem of spam. After all, spam is a major problem. It clogs up the internet’s data pathways and costs companies money. The problem is that these laws really don’t mean much at all. Anybody can pass a law, but that doesn’t mean spammers will just all of a sudden turn into great little law followers. And enforcement of these laws is a problem because it is hard to sometimes find exactly who the spammer is.
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The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 is perhaps the most famous legislation regarding spam that has actually passed into law. The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act requires unsolicited commercial email messages to be properly labeled, to include opt-out instructions and to include the sender’s physical address. It also prohibits the use of deceptive subject lines and false headers. The act turned to law in 2004, yet as we all can see, spam continues and people break those requirements all the time. Obviously no congressional action can be the panacea to this problem.
Some other laws which are not passed include the Anti-Phishing Act and the Anti-Spam Act of 2003 (which is essentially the same as the CAN-SPAM act). The Ban on Deceptive Unsolicited Bulk Electronic Mail Act of 2003 would ban the use of email harvesters (CAN-SPAM does as well). The Computer Owners’ Bill of Rights would require the FTC to establish a “do not email” registry. There are several other proposed laws, all of them tackling the same problem in different ways.
The nature of the internet is such that governmental action can’t do much about this problem. The only way to curb this is to re-organize the email system so that emails have a kind of caller ID to identify the sender of emails. In this way we could at least hold spammers accountable in more cases. Finding them is the problem. We have a law in place, but its enforcement that is the issue.
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