Murkowski anti-spam bill could be a problem for ISPs

Sun May 25 00:54:42 UTC 1997

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 at inquo.net