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EU action on spam

Infoworld reports that the European Commission announced plans to combat spam yesterday, promising “concrete action” by October.

Research commissioned by the European Commission shows that by the end of this summer more than half of all the e-mails in the union will be spam. Erkki Liikanen, European Commissioner for Enterprise and the Information Society announced confidently:

Combatting spam has become a matter for us all, and has become one of the most significant issues facing the Internet today.

Yes, spam is annoying but let’s get things into perspective… In the typical bureaucrat fashion, you first build up a problem and then you solve it and bask in the glory of central control…

The EC promised that the concrete action would focus on effective enforcement based on international cooperation among different countries. It would also include technical measures for countering spam, and raising consumer awareness of the issue.

I wonder how this will be achieved. More monitoring, more data pooling and generally more interference with ISPs and private companies.

The Commission’s plans are designed to coincide with a new law on data protection that forbids unsolicited e-mailing. This directive is due to be transposed into the statute books of the 15 European Union member states in October.

Great. What we need is another directive forbidding this or that. And pray, do tell how will they enforce that…?

Under the data protection law, e-mail marketing will only be allowed with prior consent from the recipient. This “opt-in” approach does, however, permit marketing companies to target their existing customers.

Yes, a good idea, but why does it have to be regulated from the top? How gracious of the EC to permit marketing companies to target their existing customers. Arguably there is a widespread ‘conning’ of customers by many Web firms promising that they will not share private information and then selling or renting their customer lists anyway. But as this article indicates customers and markets are a much better way of handling this kind of issue than a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels.

7 comments to EU action on spam

  • Ron

    Seems to me the simplest way to stop spam would be for ISPs to implement user-defined “Message Rules” at the server end, in a similar way to Outlook’s Message Rules at the client end.

    For example, private individuals could have a rule that an email from someone they haven’t sent an email to themself is probably spam. ISPs could maintain each user’s list of trusted senders in this way.

    One advantage of the old Compuserve mail system was that when you logged on to your inbox it merely gave you a detailed list of the messages waiting for you so that you could instantly delete unwanted stuff at the server, and only downloading the emails you wanted.

  • This is yet another grand, useless gesture from the ‘must-be-seen-to-be-doing-something’ school from which every Eurocrat appears to have graduated. The vast majority of the spam we get bombarded with in this country comes from outside the EU (most notably USA, Russia, South Africa) where these rules have no effect whatsoever.

  • Tony H

    Yes, the government should stay out of it – though a businessman I spoke to on Monday night was very keen on anti-spam legislation, probably for similar reasons to his enthusiasm for the euro…
    Some net-security software claims to be able to track & trace junk mail: I think of ZoneAlarm Pro for example. I wonder how truthful their claim is. I mean, tracing the origin of spam means you could chuck a petrol bomb through the spammer’s window next time you were in Russia or wherever.
    My spam intake diminished hugely after I dumped AOL. And I use different email addresses so I know where spammers have lifted my address from – at least two have got to me via this list…

  • S. Weasel

    Most of my spam comes from the Far East, if my header-reading skills are right. Or through the Far East, anyhow.

    And I get the weirdest mail to the address I use on Samizdata. Not very much of it, and it tends to be variants of the Nigerian scam (the last copy of which purported to be from “Sergeant Liar”) and gibberish mail with viruses attached. Very little spam.

  • Guy Herbert

    My email in various places is expensively professionally filtered by Brightmail, and I still get lots. Since it’s machine-generated to evade filters these days we shouldn’t be surprised.

    Nor should we really be surprised that the eurocrats think that banning something can stop it, I suppose. Just wait for death and disease to be made illegal.

    Meanwhile, if the content is turning to fraud, I suspect that’s a good sign of spam starting to eat itself: the penis enlargements and mortgage offers aren’t paying for themselves. The recent spurt everyone but everyone’s been noticing may be the height of a spam bubble, rather than a sign that it will grow till the net grinds to a halt.

  • I suspect what the EU is really interested in is finding a popular issue that gives them support for trying to control net traffic.

    If that is it, then having an excuse to demand filtering on e-mail originating from the United States should especially appeal to them. Cf their attempt to extend VAT to American firms on the net. The Eurocrats hate Europeans being able to import things that are better and cheaper than European firms supply.

  • ‘do tell how will they enforce that’…
    They will of course do what all bureaucracies do… they will punish those that that abide by the rules with fees, penalties and audits… and lawbreakers will run amok and dodge any penalties by the nature of their evasiveness. The magnitude of the fees and penalties dodged will make their imposition on any caught draconian so even when caught they lawbreakers will simply walk away with a slap on the wrist…