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By silicon.com, 18 September 2003 16:21

COMMENT After months of talk and years of failing to address the issue, the UK government has finally launched its legislation to curb the activities of spammers. Cause for optimism? Hardly. silicon.com was critical throughout the draft process and we see no reason for a change of heart now. Put simply this legislation is too little, too late... not to mention too lame. For a start the legislation covers only personal emails. Emails to companies will not be covered by the legislation and so the actual amount of spam covered by the legislation is actually the minority in terms of total spam traffic. Businesses, who are hardest hit by the spam problem, are still lacking support at the highest level. While the issue of private email addresses being spammed throws up the highly emotive issue of children being exposed to offensive pornographic spam - which is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed - it is inconceivable that the government can consider this a 'job done' when the reach of this legislation is so limited. The justification for why this is such an incomplete policy is because the government didn't want to harm "genuine business to business commerce". Which is incredible. Businesses operating email marketing campaign responsibly should already be up to speed with data protection issues and should want to be seen to be operating within the law. These companies were never the problem. Such a light-handed approach to legislation merely plays into the hands of the spammers. Of course the most fundamental flaw of all is that this legislation was never going to make a blind bit of difference whichever way it was drawn. A few token victims will be hauled out in front of the media, but most spammers are situated outside the reach of the long arm of UK law and as such won't care what new papers are being pushed around the desks of Whitehall. In truth, the reason the government will have done this is because they had to be seen to be doing something. Constituents have doubtless complained about these offensive emails and the MPs can't be seen to throw up their arms and protest 'there's nothing we can do about it' - they have to be seen to be doing something, even if what they are doing is unlikely to have any impact. We've said it once and we'll doubtless say it numerous more times, starting now. It will be technology which wins this war on spam.