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Congress Favors Spam Ban

U.S. House passes bill restricting unsolicited commercial e-mail.

By Margret Johnston, PCWorld   

The Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act requires accurate return addresses on unsolicited commercial e-mail and makes it illegal to continue sending junk e-mail to someone after they ask to be removed from a distribution list. The measure passed 427 to 1.

The sole opponent was Rep. Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas.

Passage of the act was the culmination of more than a year of coalition building after spam bills with similar intent became bogged down in Congress two years ago, says Rep. Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico), the bill's sponsor.

"We are one big step closer to providing consumers with the ability to free themselves from the annoying and sometimes offensive flood of junk e-mail clogging their computers," Wilson says in a statement.

Fighting Porn, Downtime

Wilson urged passage partly to combat the junk e-mail that contains pornographic solicitations or links to X-rated Web sites. But she also was driven by ISPs that complain junk e-mail harms their operations by tying up and sometimes crashing their servers.

The bill lets ISPs sue spammers for $500 per message if they violate the ISPs'junk e-mail policy. It also requires ISPs to let their customers "opt out," or remove their names from junk e-mail lists, if the ISP profits from allowing the spam into the system.

The legislation also penalizes spammers who continuing to send junk e-mail after someone has asked for it to stop. It would require unsolicited commercial e-mail to be labeled. Under the terms of the bill, it would be a misdemeanor criminal offense when spammers intentionally use fraudulent return addresses or routing information.

Sen. Conrad Burns, a Republican from Montana, has introduced a similar version of Wilson's bill in the U.S. Senate, where the measure now goes.