• PC World
• » Tech Industry

Long-suffering spam recipients have acquired a new ally in their ongoing struggle to stem the ever-rising tide of unsolicited e-mail: the Federal Trade Commission.

While the FTC is not tackling the admittedly enormous problem in its entirety--at least not yet--it has begun to crack down on marketers who use bulk commercial e-mail to engage in deceptive or unlawful practices. In February, the agency filed six civil lawsuits against individual participants in a massive spamming campaign aimed at luring investors into a classic pyramid investment scheme.

The marketers' e-mail messages promised recipients that if they invested $500, they would realize a payoff of $46,000 within three months.

According to FTC investigators, these marketers were engaging in a "Ponzi" scheme that was doomed to collapse because, to keep it going, operators would have had to recruit an impossibly large pool of investors. The agency's lawsuits--which it filed in U.S. district courts in Florida, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and California--charged the operators with engaging in deceptive marketing.

Howard Beales, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, says that the suits were the first step in an enforcement campaign that will eventually take on bulk commercial e-mailers who engage in other deceptive practices--among them, failure to include a valid return e-mail address in their posts.

Most Internet users will welcome any FTC effort to halt the daily barrage of e-mail pitches for everything from herbal Viagra and sexual enhancement products to pornographic Web sites and dubious get-rich-quick schemes.

Ray Everett-Church, a director of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (CAUCE), however, says that he'd like to see the FTC do more to fight spam.

"Generally, I think the antispam world would have liked to see the FTC lead off with something stronger than just going after pyramid schemes," Everett-Church says. "But any enforcement at all is good."

Last year, federal lawmakers introduced five measures designed to stem the flood of unsolicited marketing e-mail. But these attempts have made little headway, especially in a Republican-dominated House of Representatives that tends to view the bills as unnecessarily antibusiness. Only one bill--H.R. 718 by U.S. Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico)--had made its way out of committee at press time. Critics say that amendments have weakened that measure to the point where it provides little consumer protection.

Everett-Church says the key amendment was a switch away from an opt-in requirement that would have restricted spammers to e-mailing only people who give them permission to do so. Instead, the bill merely requires marketers to remove individuals from mailing lists if they request it after receiving spam.

"That is unacceptable to the antispam people because it puts the burden on the consumer," Everett-Church says.

E-mail marketing experts say that spam opponents have been more successful in getting states to pass antispam laws because of the lack of organized resistance at the state level: According to law professor David E. Sorkin's spam law Internet site, 20 states already have enacted some form of restriction on spam. Another dozen states are considering legislative action.

The laws seem to be surviving judicial challenge. Earlier this year, the California Court of Appeals upheld a 1998 state law requiring that e-mail marketers include a toll-free telephone number or valid e-mail address on each message to enable consumers to contact senders and ask to be dropped from future mailings.

But state laws have limited impact because federal law bars states from imposing restrictions on interstate trade. And both federal and state antispam laws would be difficult to enforce against spammers who operate outside the United States.

What has made adopting national restrictions so problematic is the difficulty of banning obnoxious commercial advertising without interfering with individuals' freedom of speech.

"Things that some people consider spam, like anonymously sent political e-mails, we feel are constitutionally protected," says Rob Courtney, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology located in Washington, D.C.

With the outlook cloudy for heavy government intervention, Everett-Church says that identifying and complaining to a spammer's Internet service provider is still the most effective antispam strategy. Since many ISP contracts prohibit users from sending bulk e-mail, your complaint could shut spammers down--if only until they find a new ISP.

• See more like this:
• news and trends,
• news & trends,
• spam,
• ftc,
• antispam,
• federal trade commission,
• e-mail,
• email,
• unsolicited email,
• unsolicited e-mail,
• H.R. 718,
• HR 718