Help may be on the way for millions of Internet users who are plagued by tidal waves of spam, get-rich-quick schemes, offers to enlarge various body parts, hard-core pornography and even worse – child porn solicitations.
Tonight, the House of Representatives seriously considered outlawing most spam and creating a “do-not-spam” registry – similar to the Federal Trade Commission’s recently deployed “National Do Not Call Registry governing telemarketers – for those who don’t want their in-boxes buried in filth, commercial offers and Nigerian Fraud appeals.
There was bipartisan support for a compromise bill prescribing both prison and huge fines for offenders convicted of flooding inboxes with porn and other unwanted e-mail solicitations.
According to a Reuters report, Texas Democratic Rep. Gene Green commented, “There’s so many good things in this bill, it’s hard to go over them all in a few minutes.”
A similar bill passed 97-0 last month in the Senate. It is expected to sign off on the compromise bill early next week, and President Bush is expected to sign the bill into law.
Surveys say unwanted e-mail, generically called spam, comprises over half of all e-mail, leading even online marketers to conclude some restrictions are necessary, reports Reuters.
Spam has become a major stumbling-block for the world’s most popular form of communication. It has even led to instances of “spam rage,” such as yesterday’s arrest of a Silicon Valley computer programmer accused of threatening to torture and kill employees of the outfit that flooded his inbox with offers to enlarge his sexual organs.
Telling Reuters his computer had been made virtually unusable for two months due to an endless barrage of unwanted pop-ups and e-mail, he now faces a five-year prison sentence and $250,000 fine. Most Internet-users don’t go that far in combating spammers and pornographers – but many of them feel like it.
“For the first time during the Internet era, American consumers will have the ability to say no to spam,” said Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., who spearheaded the negotiations, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Although the Internet has given us abilities beyond our wildest dreams, it has also produced endless headaches with all of the crippling congestion spam causes to computers every day.”
Hopefully said Tauzin, this legislation will “end all of that nonsense.”
