The legislation will not come into effect until the House of Representatives, which will draft its own legislation, and the Senate agree on a single law which will be submitted to the US president, George W Bush, for approval. The Bush administration has flagged its support for the new laws, which will include criminal penalties for serious offenders.
The United States has taken longer to table anti-spam legislation than Australia and the United Kingdom.
However, chief executive officer of US-based company Unspam, a consultancy that advises business and government on spam, Matthew Prince, told ZDNet Australia the act will not become law quickly.
"They're pretty much stuck without going anywhere," he said during a phone interview. "The reality is the House isn't going to pass it until the new year."
One of the reasons the legislation has been such a long time coming is the US Constitution's First Amendment, which covers freedom of speech concerns. If the government passes laws that tell marketers not to send unsolicited e-mails, it could find itself in a constitutional grey area, Prince said. The key to the success of the legislation is the establishment of a "do not spam" registry.
"You have to be a little more clever in the way you legislate," he explained. "We have to create a registry where consumers express their desire not to receive communication, rather than the government expressing the desire for them.... That tends to satisfy the First Amendment concern."
"The thing that this law does which is critical which no other anti-spam law that's been passed around the world is that it creates this registry," he added. "What a registry allows the government to do is set up a system whereby email addresses are tied to a specific jurisdiction."
Prince expects the registry idea to catch on. "While the US has been behind the ball on a lot of this for political and constitutional reasons, the registry approach ... is going to spread around the world because it solves the jurisdictional issues," he said.
I'm not sure how changing the law is going to stop the activities of those spammers who use viruses to set up relays, hijack other people's mail servers and domains etc. None of this activity is overt and it's mostly reasonably difficult to trace. Making spam illegal is not going to stop it, as it's more or less ALREADY illegal.
What's really needed is increased awareness of security issues across the board (INCLUDING all the home users, particularly on broadband, who think they don't need to worry about security).