Congress Revisiting Spam Plans

from the amazingly-quick dept

When the CAN SPAM law was first passed, anyone who thought through what the law actually said realized that it wouldn't work, and some people started asking what was plan B? Instead of just patting themselves on the back, we wanted to know exactly how they would measure the success or failure of the bill, and what they would do in the very likely event that it made the problem worse, not better. The sponsors of the bill never really responded to that question, but just talked about how wonderful it was that they were now banning spam. Except, only five months into the law being in effect and the spam problem is clearly worse, not better. For once, however, it appears that even some folks in Congress realize this and are already interested in revisiting the law. Some of this article is just repeating the things that we posted last week about the FTC exploring other options such as a bounty system encouraging people to track down spammers, but the fact that more politicians are realizing CAN SPAM isn't working is a good thing. Of course, we still haven't heard from the Senators who were so proud of themselves for coming up with the law in the first place.