The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (CAUCE, www.cauce.org) is disappointed by the passage of a weak anti-spam bill in the House of Representatives and Senate. This legislation fails the most fundamental test of any anti-spam law, in that it neglects to actually tell any marketers not to spam. Instead, it gives each marketer in the United States one free shot at each consumer's e-mail inbox, and will force companies to continue to deploy costly and disruptive anti-spam technologies to block advertising messages from reaching their employees on company time and using company resources. It also fails to learn from the experiences of the states and other countries that have tried 'opt-out' legal frameworks, where marketers must be asked to stop, to no avail. In fact, the bill would preempt an opt-in law set to go into effect in California on January 1, 2004, which was passed after an state opt-out law similar to the current federal legislation was found to be a failure.
Business as usual. The right companies made the right payoffs and our Congress rolled over. Not only does the bill not work, it's actually worse than no action at all.
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