---- From: John R Levine <johnl@iecc.com> To: nanog@merit.edu Date: Friday, May 23, 1997 10:02 PM Subject: Murkowski anti-spam bill could be a problem for ISPs

No, this isn't a rant about spam. It's about a misguided anti-spam bill that puts potentially onerous rules on every ISP in the country.

Sen. Frank Murkowski of Alaska filed a bill earlier this week that's intended to solve the spam problem. His intentions are clearly good, and based on his press release, he seems to understand many of the issues, but his bill is very unfortunate. It says:

* Commercial e-mail must be tagged with "advertisement"

Delightful! /advertisement/j to all of 'em.

* All ISPs must provide tag filtering on inbound mail

If the ISP maintains your e-mail account, this seems like a simple patch to sendmail or popd. If, by "ISP" you mean "anyone who provides a circuit", obviously much more difficult.

* Commercial e-mail must provide a real return address, and accept remove requests. They have 48 hours to act on a remove request.

Given that virtually all e-spammers are simply unemployable trash, this seems pointless.

* The FTC can discipline misbehaving ISPs.

Makes sense, if the ISP actually takes part in the transaction, rather than simply forwarding packets.

* Various penalties for unsigned ads, for ISPs that don't provide filtering, for spammers who continue to send ads after receiving a remove.

I'm not thrilled about having to muck around with mail forwarding, but if there was an impetus to do it, and sandards were established, it would be fairly simple. On the other hand, I get a nice little warm feeling from slapping some sh*t-fer-brains in Miami with a summons & complaint demanding liquidated damages of $50,000,000. There are advantages to having a legal department that fills an entire floor. :-)

There's a press release and a full copy of the bill on the senator's web

site

at http://www.senate.gov/~murkowski/press/EMail052197.html

Seems to me that if this were enacted into law, it'd be bad news for ISPs, since the volume of spam would increase (since it'd be officially legal) and ISPs would have to provide filtering on mountains of inbound spam. And, of course, opt-out lists don't work.

Can't see it. If you can perform effective filtering, the spam would almost certainly decrease. Opt-out lists would be fairly redundant.

People say they've been talking to Murkowski, he's amenable to argument and will probably revise his bill next week. If you think this bill would affect your business (he's a pro-business conservative Republican, after all), it's worth a phone call.

Sounds like it is.