Few of our elected representatives have done any better. The UK government shamefully capitulated to the direct marketing industry by bringing in a law that specifically made it legal to send spam to businesses - a masterpiece of misdirection.
The true heroes of the spam wars are people like Steve Linford, director of Spamhaus. He runs a blacklist of the worst spammers and so helps ISPs to block their wares. As a reward, he is a regular target for legal action -- he's even had death threats from the organised criminals who run the worst spamming operations.
Linford played an important role in helping the Australian government to write its own anti-spam law. In Australia, if you send unsolicited emails you can be fined over one million Australian dollars. That's close to half a million pounds, for every day that you spam.
That hit the spammers where they hurt. Spamhaus detected a plunge in spam from Australia as soon as the law came into force. In contrast, after Britain's feeble anti-spam law was introduced Linford actually saw spammers flooding into the UK.
But a nation-by-nation fix won't be enough -- after all, the Net is a global medium. Sender ID is back from its near-death experience and the SPF community are still active. Technological solutions will be found to stamp down on this menace.
Legislation can only play a secondary role in the long term, as spammers will inevitably shift their operations into whichever countries have the laxest rules. But in the short and medium-term, anti-spam laws are desperately needed to stem the tide.
And the great news is that Europe may be facing up to this challenge. Linford has been called in by the European Commission to advise it on new spam legislation. He's going to tell them to follow the Australian model. Europe needs to listen to Linford, to act, and to force countries like Britain to do a better job of squishing spam -- and to ignore the faceless civil servants and self-interested businesses who lack the motivation and the skills to help.
Talkback
Why not require from ISP's that they install and activate free anti-spam on each and every incoming and outgoing e-mail? Also between ISP's.
That'll save them bandwidth so the service will pay for itself. It'll also make it possible to establish communications between a suspected spammer and those they have a legal contract with (his/her ISP) even before the spams go up the rest of the Internet. And it'll put spammer ISP's into the position of having to face countless of ISP's out there that are dropping and monitoring incoming spams (because they have to) and thus could be motivated to simply blackhole sources that generate way to much spam. Best of all, such a system could be implemented by using existing solutions. And since not every ISP will use the same anti-spam solution diversity will ensure succes and preventing single (legal) loopholes to get exploited.
Imagine being a senior citizen and having to face a 1M fine because someone hacked your PC and turned it into a spam center.
If spam fines are to become law then so should be realistic vendor liability. Despite the many EULA's that (perhaps) wave vendor liability. Say, just to get your hands on the next security patch or OS upgrade.