Spammers Against Spam

E-Mail Marketers Think Bills in Congress Can Actually Help Them

By Yochi J. Dreazen
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Ronald Scelson makes his living sending out 120 million commercial e-mails a year. Yet, he is one of the strongest supporters of new federal legislation against spam.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Wait, there's more. Huge corporations such as AOL Time Warner, Microsoft and Yahoo support the legislation, too, even though many of them send commercial e-mail to their own customers, a practice that would be limited under the legislation. The Direct Marketing Association, which has sued to block a new federal "do not call" list for telemarketers, has endorsed the antispam bills. And, rounding out the paradoxes, the loose-knit coalition of consumer and public-interest groups that have led the fight against spam for years are now scrambling to try to derail the bills.

In short, the intense lobbying over the antispam bills is the exact opposite of what usually occurs with such legislation: Big business, with almost no exceptions, supports spam control. Consumer and public-interest groups, with almost no exceptions, oppose the bills.

Who Benefits?

What's going on here? "It's a sign of who benefits from these bills and who doesn't," says John Mozena, spokesman for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. "When you see some of the biggest spammers in the country backing legislation that is allegedly antispam, you really need to wonder about what these bills actually do."

What they don't do, to the dismay of consumer groups who favor much tougher legislation, is ban the countless unsolicited pitches for Viagra or Nigerian get-rich-quick schemes that typically constitute spam. Rather, the legislation "will condemn consumers to lives with more unsolicited e-mail, not less," consumer groups wrote in a blistering letter to powerful lawmakers this past summer.

Spam is now estimated to account for more than 40% of all e-mail traffic world-wide, and two trillion spam messages are projected to be sent this year alone. All of those unwanted messages cost businesses a total of nearly $10 billion a year in lost productivity, wasted bandwidth and technical-support costs.

The most popular spam legislation, co-sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Montana Sen. Conrad Burns, would ban deceptive subject lines and require valid return addresses and mechanisms for opting out of future commercial e-mails. (Read related Editorial)

The bill calls for criminal penalties for spammers who intentionally disguise their identities; would allow the Federal Trade Commission to impose civil fines; and would permit state attorneys general and private Internet service providers to sue spammers directly. The bill is backed by, among others, EarthLink, eBay and Microsoft, which recently filed 15 lawsuits against large-scale spammers.

New York Sen. Charles Schumer added a provision asking the FTC to create a "do not spam" list, akin to the agency's recently created "do not call" list for telemarketers.

The House is weighing a bill that bill bars the collection of random e-mail addresses from the Internet and requires e-mails to allow consumers to opt out of receiving future ones. But the House bill, unlike the Senate version, doesn't allow states to sue companies that don't honor opt-out requests and has a looser definition of what types of commercial messages would still be allowed.

Some variant of the two bills is expected to pass Congress overwhelmingly and is likely to become law later this year.

On Par With Snail Mail

Spammers, for their part, support the legislation, because it doesn't ban unsolicited e-mails. Instead, it would set up a series of rules for spammers to follow.

Mr. Scelson, who says he makes almost $50,000 in profit in a good month, says the bill would make his work harder and costlier, but he favors it because it puts e-mail ads on a par with pitches by regular mail. "Commercial e-mail is no different from the snail mail you get every day, except that the junk mail wastes paper and makes you lug it all out to the trash can, while e-mail only makes you hit delete," he says. "But it's my business that has the bad name. A bill like this can change that."

Consumer groups object to the bills because they still allow companies to send spam, require consumers to take the trouble of removing themselves from e-mail lists and fail to allow consumers to sue over spam.

Sen. Wyden and other lawmakers who support the bills say they had to make some choices to arrive at language acceptable to a majority of the Senate.