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Kill
spam - but not legitimate e-business
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| Wading through
the spam - what a bore! |
By Maria Livanos Cattaui
Singapore,
27 August 2003
- Only a few years ago, the Internet was billed as the great leveller
that allowed small businesses to reach out to vast markets at negligible
cost. All they needed, so we thought, was a product people wanted to buy.
Those heady dreams
of a commercial Promised Land for the little guy were plausible before
spam attained epidemic proportions. Now inboxes are jammed every day with
so many unsolicited messages that it is getting hard to fish out the useful
emails from the junk.
And legitimate businesses
trying to reach out to customers among all those purveyors of porn and
get-rich-quick scams are being drowned out and discredited by association.
Something has to be
done, or the e-marketing dream for small and medium-sized enterprises
will turn to ashes.
Whatever remedies
are applied should be free of unintended side effects. In cracking down
on spam, governments must avoid throwing the baby of legitimate business
out with the bath water of bogus offers to solve your debt problems, to
sell you Viagra without prescription, to enhance your anatomy, or to give
you millions of dollars if only you will agree to put your bank account
at the disposal of an unjustly persecuted Nigerian oil ministry official.
Yet that is exactly
what much spam-fighting legislation does. Many countries are considering
an "opt-in" regime barring the sending of unsolicited commercial
communications by e-mail or other electronic messaging systems without
the prior consent of the addressee.
The snag for legitimate
businesses is that "opt-in" requires the prospective customer
to know of the existence of the seller beforehand, removing any chance
for a company to use e-mail shots to explore new marketing territory and
enlarge its customer base. Thus the Internet is being robbed of its greatest
charm for small businesses.
A second snag is that
those dodgy officials in Nigeria, those snake-oil salesmen, those pornographers
and those purveyors of illicit medication are scarcely likely to heed
restrictive national laws. But legitimate businesses will always comply
with the law. These laws risk being ineffective against spam while penalizing
the law-abiding.
The trouble with "opt
in" is that it fails to distinguish between legitimate commercial
e-mail and spam. E-mail is ideal for telling customers and potential customers
about product updates, new services and special offers. It is no different
from traditional mailings to groups of people who are likely to buy a
given product - say a subscription to a literary magazine, horticultural
products, or domestic central heating. There should be no bar to approaching
a prospective customer.
Reputable e-marketers
conform to strict ethical rules, like the Code on Direct Marketing of
the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). They do not deserve to be
lumped together with purveyors of spam, which may be defined as untargeted
commercial e-mail from sources that disguise or conceal their identity,
make fraudulent claims, purvey goods or services that are illegal or provide
no genuine opt-out.
Is there any way to
distinguish between the honest traders and the spreaders of the spam plague?
Legal requirements
that direct marketing by e-mail or text messaging may not conceal or disguise
the identity of the sender can be helpful. The same goes for the stipulation
that such messages must also include a valid address to which recipients
can send a request to be taken off the mailing list - an "opt out"
provision.
Governments should
avoid taking a blanket approach to spam, and analyse those aspects of
e-mail messaging that are clearly objectionable to consumers and seek
to outlaw or criminalize that activity. Then they should step up efforts
to fight harmful spam by means of effective law enforcement.
There are no silver
bullets, no easy solutions. The Internet poses its own special problems
of jurisdiction and law enforcement. More thought is needed and business
is ready to participate. Let common sense prevail.
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Maria Livanos Cattaui
is Secretary General of the International Chamber of Commerce
Commission
on E-business, IT, Telecoms
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