European Parliament to come to crucial vote on spam
"Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs" asks European Parliament to force the floodgates wide open for spam
A giant tidal wave of unsolicited advertising may soon be heading for your eMail inbox if plans to legalize spam win support in the Parliament's attempt to veto a directive that would outlaw these ceaseless attacks to invade your privacy at your own expense.
The "European Parliament and Council directive concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector", widely acclaimed by consumers and businesses alike as very reasonable for finally banning spam from all means of electronic communication, in line with the irrefutable findings of the ARETE study, could now come into force - unless the European Parliament, in the codecision procedure's second reading under Article 251 of the EC treaty, decides to "amend" and turn on its head the "opt-in" article 13 of the Common Position.
For almost a decade, the Internet has been plagued by "spam", a flood of unsolicited bulk eMail of predominantly offensive or illegal contents, increasingly threatening the viability of eMail. Besides associations such as CAUCE or JunkBusters and petitions like "Vote against SPAM!", even the advertising industry (e.g. dmmv and the DMA), formerly lobbying to the contrary, meanwhile demands to adopt the only workable approach of "confirmed opt-in".
However, the "Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs" now tries to exclude all electronic messages from the protection of this directive, except for the "SMS" cellular telephone messaging system, in an approach already bound to fail as it lacks both technological neutrality required to cope with the forthcoming "digital convergence" of various media, and the potential for harmonisation of the European legal framework, which would be even more indispensable in the "opt-out" systems envisaged by the Committee.
If a majority can be tricked into supporting this "recommendation" (which has promptly caused the European Consumers' Organisation to question whether this committee can live up to its name at all), May 29, 2002 may soon be remembered for bringing about "the end of eMail as we know it".
Putting "blocks of concrete" at the netizens' feet?
The "opt-out" approach, already condemned as "completely illogical" (Liikanen) by the European Commission, is based on the assumption that all recipients should pay for countless unwanted "postage-due letters" which they cannot refuse. Everyone is supposed to somehow "learn to swim in an ocean of spam" in the opt-out system which the Direct Marketing Association, prior to finally reversing its position and joining the voices of common sense, called the "one bite at the apple" rule, best described in a less euphemistic way as "get spammed (by everyone) until you beg them (each of them, individually, every single time) to stop", i.e. a "send-until-they-scream policy".
Even where spam is currently considered illegal in Europe e.g. under competition or data protection law (cf. the CNIL report), in the event of a misguided adoption of an "opt-out" system at the Member States' option (or any other approach leaving the slightest legal loophole to spammers), which would grant a general "licence to spam", a bleak future is a mathematical certainty: If only the ridiculously small number of 1% of European businesses decided to advertise by unsolicited eMail, every single inbox would be hit by and have to opt out from a spam message approximately once every 30 seconds, making their deletion alone a "full time" job, although taking into account neither figures for the U.S. which are no less alarming, nor the potential for abuse inherent in any "opt-out" approach:
"Careful tests have been done with sending remove requests for 'virgin' email accounts (that have never been used anywhere else). In over 80% of the cases, this resulted in a deluge of unsolicited email, although usually from other sources than the one the remove was sent to." (Hambridge/Lunde, RFC2635).
Turning the tide?
Even before the imminent decision by the European Parliament, the spam waves keep rising dramatically, having reached unbearable levels at which, as a last resort, desperate users claim to be forwarding their unsolicited eMail to politicians to make them see and share the suffering of ordinary netizens, while others have already begun to lose faith in the politicians' resolve to tackle the problem, and are now turning to nothing less than the call for outright real-world violence, actually vowing to place a bounty on spammers' heads "to get them beaten up and their (spam)houses burnt down"
In case the Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs, whose rapporteur in this procedure is alleged to be involved in spamming campaigns himself, has its way of endorsing a "laisser-faire" attitude, the impact of spam rates multiplying will be felt far beyond Europe: Many Europeans have their eMail address at a foreign provider, predominantly in the US, and since they are indistinguishable from those of users located elsewhere, all over the world everyone will have to witness and cope with an increased intake of unsolicited communications from European spammers. No doubt, the Internet will then respond to this issue in its very own way, devastating to European companies:
"The saddest part of the spam problem is this:
The 'technical solutions' you name above already cause entire nations to be blackholed in thousands of servers around the world. Many postmasters have received only spam from .cn and .kr, so they dump all mail from those TLDs in the trash." (Tom Geller).
If the Members of the European Parliament whose dispostion regarding spam can be queried at EuroCAUCE should decide to block the way of the "opt-in" directive and choose legal fragmentation among the member states instead, including the dreaded "opt-out" systems, they may thereby miss the last chance to eradicate spam before eMail becomes unusable as a communications medium.