Why not voice these complaints to Senator Murkowski? He has the following text on his webpage: NOTE: Senator Murkowski strongly encourages the Internet community to make specific recommendations or comments about the legislation. Please send them to this address: commercialemail@murkowski.senate.gov On Sat, 24 May 1997, Pete Kruckenberg wrote: ]On Sat, 24 May 1997, Deepak Jain wrote: ] ]>>> * The FTC can discipline misbehaving ISPs. ]>>> * Various penalties for unsigned ads, for ISPs that don't provide ]>>> filtering, for spammers who continue to send ads after receiving a remove. ]> ]> Don't these two lines cause everyone a little bit of grief? ]> ]> 1) What can the FTC do to discipline an ISP? ]> 2) Why should ISPs be required to filter? Wouldn't it make sense that ]> customers would decide if they want to make a purchase based on *if* ]> filtering were available? ] ]I see serious problems with this as well. First, it is inconsistent with ]the way that other "unwanted" messages. For example, your postmaster is ]not required to filter through your mail and remove any junk mail (usually ]"tagged" as "bulk mail"). And yes, you are paying for that mail to get to ]you as a US tax payer. ] ]Second, I think it opens huge liabilities for an ISP. What happens, for ]example, if an ISP mistakenly filters out an important legitamate message ]because it met the conditions of a junk message? Or, if an ISP fails to ]filter out all junk mail because of a failure of the filtering system or ]because the junk mail is not properly tagged? ] ]On the other side, I think there are huge liabilities that come up from ]the people who might *want* spam (obviously there must be people who ]respond to spam), as well as whatever rights spammers may have to ]communicate their message. It stinks of a ripe first amendment lawsuit ]when you talk about the carriers of the message completely shutting off ]communications of this sort. Of course, I'm not an attorney. ] ]The thing that most concerns me is that the easiest target to hit is the ]ISP. The customer isn't doing anything except complaining, and the spammer ]can pull up roots quickly and move on without leaving tracks. Only the ]ISP, who bears the brunt of responsibility and liability, is involved ]enough and is permanent enough that if fines are levied or lawsuits filed, ]they're the most likely (if not the only) ones to get hit. ] ]Ironically, the ISP is actually the one who "suffers" the least, as long ]as they are protected against spam mail relaying and their customers ]aren't the ones doing the spamming. The costs of filtering, and potential ]legal costs related to this bill are far higher than any current costs of ]spam (some bandwidth and disk space). ] ]For these reasons, as an ISP, I'm very fearful of legislation like this. I ]would prefer that the ISP be completely removed from the loop, and that ]the legislation focus strictly on ways that Internet users can do their ]own spam filtering (even potentially having a user-specified server-side ]filter, so they don't have to download the spam messages), and leave it at ]that. ] ]Pete Kruckenberg ]VP Engineering ]inQuo, Inc. ]pete@inquo.net ] ]