David Canton is a business lawyer and trade-mark agent with a practice focusing on technology issues and technology companies.
Slashdot points to articles claiming the Australian gold medal mogul winner is a wealthy spam king. He moved to Australia from Canada a while ago. Canadian journalists questioned him about his move after his win, thinking it could have been a gold for Canada – how quickly things change.
He claims his businesses are legitimate.
Yesterday’s press carried stories about Microsoft’s $7 million settlement in one of its suits against a spammer.
I believe the way to reduce spam is to make the risk/reward ratio unattractive to spammers.
So the big question is whether actions like this increase the risk and create enough publicity to deter other spammers.
Techdirt has a post that questions whether such amounts are a drop in the bucket, and whether it just alerts potential spammers as to how lucrative it can be.
Only time will tell – but we should applaud the efforts of those that at least try to combat spam.
VoIP (Voice over IP) phones are becoming more common for both business and consumer use, and are poised to make a significant dent in POTS (plain old telephone service) use.
VoIP has many advantages over normal phone lines, including lower cost, more flexibility, and more services.
For example, Canada is working on a “do not call” registry (ie a list where one can add their name if they don’t want to be phoned by telemarketers), but recent comments suggest it may be watered down to be ineffective.
Rob Hyndman refers in his blog to the possibility that VoIP service could employ call filters similar to spam filters on our email.
That raises 2 points to ponder.
1. – Perhaps technology will work here where the law may not.
2. – Once the VoIP 911 issue gets under control (I’ll boldly predict by this fall), there are so many advantages to VoIP that people will stay with POTS only if they don’t understand VoIP or are resistant to change.
Read Rob Hyndman’s post
Read an earlier article of mine on VoIP
Canada’s spam task force recomends a number of inititives, including some new anti-spam laws. They recognize that a coordinated effort is needed. It includes an interesting chart showing spam trends and the impact (usually temporary) of attempts to control it.
I believe spam will only be reduced as the risk/reward ratio changes. In other words, the financial gains of sending spam must become less than the costs (both in actual dollars to send, and the legal risk of sanctions.
We can do our part by using filters and deleting what comes through.
We can gain some comfort from the fact that different attempts are being made to deal with spam.
On the legal front, lawsuits have been launched against spammers, including one just announced by Microsoft and Phizer.
On the self-help front, the “419 Flash Mob” is trying to orchestrate mass denial of service attacks on certain spammers. (A DOS attack floods the servers with so much incoming traffic that they crash.) Perhaps that is no more proper than the spammer’s actions – but the victims would not get much sympathy. Call it poetic justice.
One of the challenges in legislating against Spam is to define what it is. We all recognize the typical spam from unknown sources trying to sell us drugs or other products. It is not easy though to define where the dividing line is between those and legitimate email.
The US FTC has just released its rules under the CAN-SPAM Act that determines when email has a commercial primary purpose and is subject to the act.
As evidence of the difficulty in defining it – the document is 81 pages long!
Industry Canada’s Spam Task force is presenting a roundtable discussion Friday morning at 9:00 AM EST.
According to Industry Canada: “The purpose of the Stakeholder Roundtable is to provide an update of actions taken by the Task Force, as well as identify anticipated future challenges and solutions. The Roundtable will also offer an opportunity for key stakeholders to provide feedback regarding the fight against spam. In doing so, the Roundtable will highlight the progress being made in implementing the Anti-Spam Action Plan and the collaborative effort needed in the fight against spam”
Listen to the Roundtable
Unless otherwise stated, all original material created by David Canton included in this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
