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FC: Weekly column: Be wary of Washington's solutions to spam

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Mon, 09 Sep 2002 23:54:27 -0400 To: politech@politechbot.com From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: Weekly column: Be wary of Washington's solutions to spam Send reply to: declan@well.com

http://news.com.com/2010-1074-957024.html?tag=politech

Be wary of Washington's spam solution By Declan McCullagh September 9, 2002, 4:00 AM PT

WASHINGTON--About three dozen high-level lobbyists met quietly last Friday afternoon at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to concoct a way to drastically reduce the deluge of unsolicited e-mail.

The invitation-only lunch meeting, which lasted about two hours, started a process that could result in an industry agreement on new laws or self-regulation.

Lobbyists for AOL Time Warner, Verizon, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, and the Direct Marketing Association were among the attendees. According to the invitation, the group met to discuss "approaches to addressing problems arising from abusive electronic mail practices."

All that sounds pretty good, right? After all, who could be against efforts to reduce the heaps of spam that are snarling mail servers, clogging connections and making our in-boxes approximately as useful as a 10MB hard drive? One of my News.com colleagues estimates that spam soon will make up the majority of message traffic on the Internet.

But Washington rarely has the best solution. When you dump a passel of lawyers and lobbyists in a room, dub them a working group and close the door, they end up crafting new laws and regulations. And new laws and regulations from Washington simply won't stop spam.

[...]

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