The Direct Marketing Association has long opposed anti-spam laws. After all, their members make a living through direct marketing … i.e., spam.
Problem is, “big fleas have lesser fleas,” and the DMA members realize that folks are tuning out all commercial e-mail, solicited or un-, because of the inexorable flood of porn ads, quack medications, insurance/mortgage/pyramid schemes and the like.
So the DMA has announced that they’re now backing federal anti-spam legislation.
Of course, like Iraqi “unconditional” inspections, what the DMA has in mind as far as legislation goes is a bit different from what most people think.
For example, spam is not, in their eyes, simply unsolicited commercial e-mail. Why, that’s every DMA members’s God-given right to pepper us with. No, they would have only fraudulent e-mail, with forged headers, be considered spam.
And, of course, they insist on opt-out system (i.e., they get to send you stuff until you click on the little “remove me” link and hope that it doesn’t just spread your name to another dozen mailing lists, a/k/a the presumption is that anyone can send you spam until you tell each individual sender that you don’t want it) . The past proposals for an opt-in system (where you don’t get anything unless you explicitly ask for it) are, in the DMA’s eyes, a non-starter.
Now, that having been said, I’m opposed to most anti-spam legislation. Problem is, given the international nature of the Net, it’s not likely to appreciably reduce the crap that infests my mailbox daily (much of which is mailed from or through China, Europe, etc.). And, frankly, I don’t feel a great need to pass legislation to help DMA members compete more successfully than their less prosperous (but equally unsavory) brethren.
Still, if even the DMA thinks that spam is a problem … well, it does give one hope.