What Good has the CAN-SPAM Act Done?
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On January 1, 2004, the CAN-SPAM Act took effect. This legislation does not so much make unsolicited commercial bulk e-mail illegal as force spammers to follow certain guidelines or be charged with a felony and face years of imprisonment. The CAN-SPAM Act, ideally, would reduce the amount of junk e-mail most of us receive and make the stuff that does get through a little more palatable (or at least a bit less absurd and fraudulent). Since then, what has changed?
Very little, apparently. According to filtering firm MessageLabs, spam now makes up more than 67 percent of global e-mail. That’s a lot of diet patches! Have the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission done nothing since January? Or is the flood simply too much for any organization, or group of organizations, to tackle?
The answer, so it seems, is a little of both. In late May, both law enforcement agencies testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on the progress they had made in enacting various parts of the CAN-SPAM Act. Concrete results that we can see in our electronic mailboxes take time, but there was at least some cause for hope.
First, the FTC. If you can’t get rid of all the spammers, you can at least target some of the worst and hope they serve as examples. At the end of April, the commission went after two noteworthy spammers: Phoenix Avatar and Global Web Promotions. These two companies alone are responsible for nearly one million of the messages that consumers have forwarded to the FTC to complain about spam since the CAN-SPAM Act took effect. The FTC holds onto the spam sent by complaining consumers and maintains it in a database -- and will now presumably use it as evidence against these scofflaws.
Next: Phoenix Avatar >>
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