FC: Democrats kvetch about "cyberlibertarian" opposition to spam laws

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Background, including CDT policy post:
http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=spam

Incidentally, CDT is hardly a "cyberlibertarian" organization. While not
as hostile to business as some groups, it is far from libertarian in its
political views (and support for some types of government regulation).

My article, which also seems to have prompted this aggrieved response
from the DLC:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,44088,00.html

-Declan

---

==================================
NEW DEMOCRATS ONLINE
--  NEW DEM DAILY --
Pithy news and commentary from the DLC.
==================================
[ http://www.ndol.org ]
                                                                        
05-JUN-2001

Getting a Label on Spam

Legislation to deal with "spam" -- unsolicited commercial email --
has been bouncing around Congress for several years, most
notably in legislation by sponsored by Reps. Heather Wilson
(R-NM) and Gene Green (D-TX), which passed the House last
year.  Last month the House Judiciary Committee killed an
amendment to this bill, sponsored by New Democrat Rep. Adam
Schiff (D-CA), that would have provided a very simple protection
for spam recipients.

The Schiff Amendment simply provided that every bite of spam
carry an identifier on the subject line of the email: the characters
ADV, for "advertising."  It would apply to all spam, but to spam
only; not to political emails or the jokes that Internet users are
forever forwarding to everyone in their address books.  It's one
of the measures the Progressive Policy Institute recommended
in a November, 1999 report, "How to Can Spam."

But while the untimely death of the Schiff amendment drew little
attention, cyberlibertarians are aflame over a provision that
remains in the bill: an amendment by Rep. Melissa Hart (R-PA)
that requires specific labeling for pornographic spam so that
unwilling viewers or parents can either delete it or create a filter
to keep it from landing like a bag of rotten potatoes on the home
PC screen.  Today, porno-spammers often use tricky and
misleading subject lines like "Sorry I missed your call," or
"Haven't heard from you in a while," aimed at misleading
recipients into opening their nasty little surprise.

A cyberlibertarian group called the Center for Democracy and
Technology views this mild and reasonable labeling requirement
as a serious threat to the Constitution, calling the label "forced
speech" which is "as offensive to the Constitution as forced
silence."  Since similar or even greater restrictions already
apply to physical mail with sexual content, the real
cyberlibertarian case lies in the mistaken impression that the
Internet is inherently a Wild West medium where no rules
should ever apply.  That's exactly the kind of thinking that could
quickly make the Internet an inhospitable zone of abusive
conduct that many current or potential users will not want to enter.

Since the argument against the Hart Amendment relies heavily
on opposition to regulation of content on the Internet,
cyberlibertarians should logically support the Schiff Amendment
as an alternative: it does not distinguish between different types
of commercial messages, and applies a strictly descriptive
subject-line label that calls it what it is: advertising.

Rep. Schiff is thinking about introducing his spam labeling bill
as free-standing legislation.  Every reasonable party to the debate
should be able to support it.  Without labels, Internet users will
continue to be force-fed spam for years -- or will get sick of it and
rely on other ways to communicate.

Related Material:

"E-Mail Spam Labeling: Why the Cyberlibertarians Have It Wrong,"
by Shane Ham, PPI Front & Center, June 4, 2001:
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=107&subsecid=126&contentid=3422

"How to Can Spam: Legislative Solutions to the Problem
Of Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail," by Randolph H. Court
and Robert D. Atkinson, PPI Policy Briefing, November 1999:
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?contentid=1349&knlgAreaID=107&subsecid=126

----------------------------------------------------------------------



-------------------------------------------------------------------------
POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list
You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice.
To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html
This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------