During the OECD workshop on spam, held in Brussels on 2 and 3 February, the consumer unions of Europe and the USA (united in the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue) presented the results of a survey amongst 21.102 consumers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. 96 percent of the people said that either they hated spam or that it annoyed them. 82% of the respondents said that governments should only allow commercial e-mails to be sent if the recipient has agreed in advance to receive them (opt-in).
In spite of this apparent massive wish for opt-in, representatives from the US Federal Trade Commission defended the new opt-out legislation in the United States. This invoked polite criticism from Commissioner Liikanen and less politely worded responses from representatives from ISPs and consumer associations.
The different approach taken on either side of the Atlantic "doesn't help" in developing an international approach to combat spam, said Erkki Liikanen, the European Commissioner for the information society. According to another spokesperson from the Commission, 80% of all the countries united in the OECD already have an opt-regime or are busy implementing it, making the US the big exception.
George Mills from Eurocauce calculated that with approximately 23 million companies in the United States, even if only 1% of these companies would spam, he would have a full time job in sending opt-out requests, even with his high average speed of 2 opt-outs per minute.
According to statistics presented by the CEO of the company Brightmail 60% of all e-mail in the world is spam. This level will reach its top later this year at 65%. Brightmail uses millions of decoy addresses to detect and analyse spam. According to these inboxes, 90% of all spam mails contains some kind of fraudulous or deceptive sender or routing information.
These statistics supported the claim from the FTC that independent of the opt-in / opt-out debate, the Can-Spam act is effective. Hugh Stevenson from the FTC explained they had already dealed with 55 cases, mostly scams. 'Follow the money', was the best advice he could give to his audience, even if it takes an average of 10 to 15 subpoena's to trace an average spammer through different providers and network parties. The new criminal sanctions on spoofing, false headers and misleading routing information enabled the FTC to deal with spam-cases that were otherwise difficult to prosecute.
More than a 100 experts from Europe, the US, Australia, Korea and Japan attended the workshop, mostly focussed on statistics and practical solutions for cross-border enforcement. One of the more hilarious verbal battles took place between Charles Prescott from the Direct Marketing Association and Marc Rotenberg from the USA based civil liberty group EPIC. They presented completely different conclusions about research on spam in the Pew Internet Project.
Though both agreed that 70% of the interviewed users in the USA said that spam made being online unpleasant or annoying, Prescott concluded that people that complain about spam complain about everything. According to him, all these people also complain about the noise of lawn blowers. Most attendees of the workshop fell completely silent after this insult, but burst out in cheerful laughter when Marc Rotenberg compared spammers to factories that pollute the environment, with governments advising citizens to carefully wash their hands, and if necessary, wear gas masks inside.
The workshop did not produce any clear conclusions, other than a confirmation of the recommendations of the European Commission to combat spam in many different ways; both with legal and technical means, as well as socially and commercially, in educating all internet users about the need to secure networks.
TACD survey on spam (02.02.2004)
http://www.tacd.org/docs/?id=225
Annotated program of the workshop (with links to presentations by speakers)
http://www.oecd.org/document/47/0,2340,en_2649_37441_26514927_1_1_1_37...
Pew Internet report on spam (22.10.2003)
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=102