FTC says anonymity is the root of the problem.

Posted Oct 31, 2003, 2:35 PM ET by Weblogs, Inc. Staff

The FTC points to anonymity, which is currently ingrained in the design of the Internet, as the root of the spam problem. Will we all have to pay Verisign for a secure signature in order to send our friends email soon? I would gladly pay $10 a year for the right to join a clean email service. That price is too high, of course, so maybe $10 for five or ten years to file an email address.

The Federal Trade Commission told legislators yesterday that a federal spam law should first aim to solve the problem of anonymity for mass e-mailers.

In testimony before the House of Representatives, the FTC said it has brought 55 spam cases, and the key to all of them has been establishing the identity of the defendants.

“The commission’s experience shows that the primary law enforcement challenges are to identify and locate the targeted spammer,” said J. Howard Beales III, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in testimony to the Small Business Committee. “Of course, finding the wrongdoers is an important aspect of all law enforcement actions, but in spam cases it is a particularly daunting task.”

The problem of identity is mostly a technological challenge, Beales said, but Congress could help by giving the FTC greater investigative power.

Beales added that legislation should include stiff penalties for spamming, possibly including criminal sanctions, and a clear standard for dealing with unsolicited commercial e-mail that is not fraudulent.

Spam and IM threaten email’s future

Posted Oct 31, 2003, 2:30 PM ET by Weblogs, Inc. Staff

IDC’s latest report states the obvious: SPAM is pushing people to IM and wasting a lot of IT resources.

According to analyst IDC, more than 20 billion spam messages are expected to be sent daily worldwide by 2006.

IDC’s report, Worldwide Email Usage Forecast, 2003-2007: Spam and Instant Messaging Take a Bite out of Email, estimates that spam represents just under a third of all external and internal email sent on an average day in North America in 2003, up from 24 per cent in 2002.

The rising torrent of spam is reducing email’s usefulness by forcing users and IT staff to expend time and energy identifying and deleting it, and preventing it from clogging inboxes.

The other prong of the attack against email comes from the value of IM’s immediacy and the growing awareness of its presence in the workplace. But it is rapidly becoming more similar to email in terms of corporate requirements for tracking and archiving of messages.

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