Australians boast of better spam laws

Australia is leading the way on anti-spam legislation, according to the Australians who are claiming it puts UK and US legislation in the shade.

While recent UK anti-spam legislation and various stalled US anti-spam bills have come under fire from anti-spam activists, Australia's Spam Bill 2003 has received support from numerous quarters. Troy Rollo, chairman of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email, Australia (CAUBE.AU) said his organisation fully supports the bill.

"We're very happy with it," said Rollo. "It sets the correct standards." He said that were some minor things CAUBE.AU would rather see changed, but as a basic standard the bill is fine.

"The exemptions are reasonably narrow," said Rollo. "The business-to-business exemptions are not something that spammers can use in a way they have in the past."

"It's stronger than the UK or US. It's the strongest I've seen."

Paul MacRae of email management company MessageLabs said he didn't think legislation will do much to ease the spam menace, claiming the best solutions are technical. However, he added there are a lot of problems inherent in the idea of the government mandating particular technologies for use by the industry.

"You've got to applaud [the government] for attempting to do something, but will it have an effect?" said MacRae. "Probably not a huge effect because the people they're aiming at are not the big guys in this space."

"Will it deter the really serious carriers? Including drug runners and organised crime?" said MacRae, referring to spam for illegal products and spam intended to defraud people. "Serious individuals have made a fair bit of money of out of it." He said it is easy to move to a country with a less legislative regime.

UK legislation has been criticised by Spamhaus Project, an anti-spam organisation that helps ISPs to block spammers from sending huge numbers of junk email. It accused UK ecommerce minister Stephen Timms of "bungling" the implementation of anti-spam laws. Spamhaus claims not enough is being doen to protect businesses, who suffer the most with spam.

A Spamhaus statement said: "Did we think the Department of Trade and Industry could cock up the UK's anti-spam law? Well, no we didn't; we thought ecommerce minister Stephen Timms had some grasp of the problem. Sadly it's now apparent the DTI were, like the American Congress, listening only to the lobby forces of the Direct Marketing Association."

There are currently several anti-spam bills before the US parliament, but the chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission said the anti-spam bills being considered by Congress lack teeth and could be counterproductive.

In strongly worded criticism of current legislation, Tim Muris characterised the dozen or so bills as well intentioned, but he warned they "will do little to solve the current spam problems" and could be even "less useful" than existing laws that the FTC has been using to sue spammers.

"No one should expect any of [the proposals] to make a substantial difference," Muris said. "In fact, they could even be harmful."

James Pearce writes for ZDNet Australia