While recent U.K. anti-spam legislation and various U.S. anti-spam bills that have been proposed have come under fire from anti-spam activists, Australia's Spam Bill 2003 has received support from numerous quarters.
Troy Rollo, chairman of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email, Australia (CAUBE.AU) told ZDNet Australia the organisation supported the bill.
"We're very happy with it," said Rollo. "It sets the correct standards." He said that were some minor things CAUBE.AU would rather see changed, but as a basic standard the bill was fine.
"The exemptions are reasonably narrow," said Rollo. "The business-to-business exemptions are not something that spammers can use in a way they have in the past."
"It's stronger than the U.K. or U.S. It's the strongest I've seen."
Paul MacRae of e-mail management company MessageLabs told ZDNet Australia he didn't think legislation would do much to ease the spam menace, claiming the best solutions were technical. However, he added there were a lot of problems inherent in the idea of the government mandating particular technologies for use by the industry.
"You've got to applaud [the government] for attempting to do something, but will it have an effect?" said MacRae. "Probably not a huge effect because the people they're aiming at are not the big guys in this space."
"Will it deter the really serious carriers? Including drug runners and organised crime?" said MacRae, referring to spam for illegal products and spam intended to defraud people. "Serious individuals have made a fair bit of money of out of it." He said it was easy to move to a country with a less legislative regime.
The U.K. legislation has been criticised by Spamhaus Project, an anti-spam organisation that helps ISPs to block spammers from sending huge numbers of junk e-mail. It accused U.K. E-commerce minister Stephen Timms of "bungling" the implementation of anti-spam law, because the legislation brought in this week will only protect consumers, and not also businesses.
"Did we think the Department of Trade and Industry could cock up the UK's anti-spam law? Well, no we didn't; we thought e-commerce minister Stephen Timms had some grasp of the problem. Sadly it's now apparent the DTI were, like the American Congress, listening only to the lobby forces of the Direct Marketing Association," claimed Spamhaus in a statement released on Thursday.
Appearing at evidence sessions organised by the All Party Internet Group this summer, Steve Linford, director of The Spamhaus Project, warned that some of the proposed laws currently before the US Congress would allow spammers to come out of the dark and quite legally send massive amounts of unsolicited email.
Even if a user opted out from receiving email from a spammer on one day, the following day the spammer would change his company name and spam every email address he could find again.
"The volume of spam going out will be massive and you will be there trying to opt out of each one, and the spammer tomorrow just changes his company name," warned Linford. "You manage to get off one of his lists and 24 hours later you are back on another of his lists."
There are several anti-spam bills before the U.S. parliament, but the chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission said the anti-spam bills being considered by Congress lack teeth and could be counterproductive.
In strongly worded criticism of current legislation, Tim Muris characterised the dozen or so bills as well intentioned, but he warned they "will do little to solve the current spam problems" and could be even "less useful" than existing laws that the FTC has been using to sue spammers.
"No one should expect any of (the proposals) to make a substantial difference," Muris said. "In fact, they could even be harmful."
Muris made his remarks during an afternoon speech at a conference organised by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a group whose stated mission is to "educate policymakers, opinion leaders and the public about issues associated with technological change, based on a philosophy of limited government, free markets and individual sovereignty." AOL Time Warner, BellSouth, Cisco Systems, Disney and many other companies are sponsors of the group.
Muris said that a long-term fix would probably mean rewriting the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), the Internet's workhorse standard, but he stopped short of saying that all new laws would be useless. One positive step, he said, would be for Congress to enact suggestions proposed by the FTC in June that would grant the agency's investigators the power to serve secret requests to Internet service providers for subscriber details, peruse FBI criminal databases and swap sensitive information with foreign law enforcement agencies.
Graeme Wearden of ZDNet UK and Declan McCullagh of CNET News.com contributed to this report
There is one and only one way to legislate against spam.
The person/company who's product is being advertised must be the party made responsible for the spam.
People are not going to generate spam if there isn't a buck in it, and no company is going to pay a spammer
if they are going to be made liable for the spam.