AW: [governance] [] US, UK and Canada refuse to sign UN's internet treaty

[Roland Perry]

In message <D393AC31-D355-415B-8A31-9B1D26FCB157 at hserus.net>, at 
21:47:41 on Sun, 23 Dec 2012, Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net> 
writes
>On 23-Dec-2012, at 21:31, Roland Perry <roland at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:
>
>>> That fraction of a percent of a fraction of a percent is enough to 
>>>more than repay the costs of the spammer's campaign multiple times over.
>>
>> Which is "good spam", to use my earlier definition.
>
>The same economics are at work in both "good" and "bad" spam.  Even 
>more so in "bad" spam because such spammers make extensive use of other 
>peoples resources - hacked servers, virus infected PCs and such.

I agree that "bad spam" steals more of other people's resources, which 
is why it's frustrating to see so many anti-spam initiatives 
concentrating entirely on the "white middle-class"[1] good spam.

>> In Europe the pressure from "big business" has been to consider that 
>>all your previous customers have by default given permission, and they 
>>need to "Opt out" to demonstrate their
>
>I am sorry - the US CAN-SPAM act is optout, but a lot of european data 
>protection and other regulations tend towards optin.  As do the 
>australian and canadian antispam acts.  Of course that's not the case 
>throughout Europe - and the laws of the individual country would apply.

The main driver for the ability of countries to implement opt-out 
regimes for supplier-customer emailing is the Privacy Directive 
[2002/58, so most of the work was done in 2001], which *allows* 
countries to make that decision. It does not allow them to choose 
opt-out for regular person-person emailing, which it mandates to be 
opt-in.

For a while the regular person-person emailing was also going to allow 
opt-out, on the grounds that European Parliamentarians at the time were 
new to email and didn't see very much spam themselves. And what they did 
see tended to be filtered into a special quarantine folder by their 
sysadmins, so they could efficiently ignore/delete it.

It was only after I conducted a successful campaign in the European 
Parliament, under the Euro-ISPA banner, that they changed their mind.

>Yes, the LINX BCPs were an early, and quite good example of best 
>practice in this area, thanks for reminding me of them.

I'm glad you liked them; making sure that government and regulators were 
aware of them, and the fundamental ideas contained within, was a big 
part of my job for three years.

[1] ie sent by clueless marketers who can, if you try hard enough, be 
educated to see the error of their ways.
-- 
Roland Perry

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