Bill writes:
Is this what we want?
Does it matter? It won't work, so it's not terribly important. Legislators
tend to develop the belief that they can cure a rainy day just by enacting a
new law, and often they are wrong. They are wrong in this case, for
example.
The legal system taking over something that should
be done by IETF.
I don't know of anything that IETF can do about spam, either.
As long as it's possible to e-mail messages and make more money from the
handful of replies than it cost to send out the messages, spam will persist.
Legal sanctions are fine, but there isn't really any way to track down the
spammers in many cases, or they are out of legal reach. Kind of like
someone sending junk mail with no return address from overseas.
This new legislation isn't supposed to stop e-mail
marketing, but stop deception. Will it work?
Deception isn't the problem with spam. Volume is the problem.
You know, I wouldn't mind receiving e-mail advertisements if there were some
way for me to specify what kind of advertisements I'd like to receive, but
just receiving everything at random makes no sense.