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| Home | Features | DMA® Info | About | Vol 28 Issue 5 October 2003 |
Letters, We Get Letters....Another View of Spam ‑ a rebuttal to Pat Suarez In the August 2003 issue of The DataBus, Pat Suarez wrote about the hopelessness of dealing with the problem of spam. I wish to offer a different point of view. Count me a whiner if you will, but the spam problem is not so much the Spam itself as the methodologies used by the mass marketers to thwart the Spain filters. One of their techniques is particularly heinous; the practice of forging return addresses and headers using legitimate domain names. This leads to the blocking legitimate domain names and/or DNSes. I know of several dozen (at least) folks who have blocked my domain name because of forged headers. And I know of at least one ISP who has blocked (albeit briefly) an AT&T mail server DNS because of forged spam headers. This will ultimately lead to chaos on the Internet as more legitimate correspondence is blocked by filters and as the spammers appropriate more domain names and DNS servers. It is not the large legitimate marketing companies and newsletters that are the problem. They are meticulous in offering an opt‑out choice in every communication they send ‑ and those with which I have acquaintance are equally meticulous in honoring those requests. And as Pat says, "those who fiddle with the corporate super‑giants will find themselves buried in hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation fees." The problem is with the fringe outfits that deluge us with offers of sex and pills and bogus business opportunities. Another weakness in Pat's argument is that these mass E‑mails are profitable with a return rate of just one tenthousandths percent. Any mail order business knows that, when using the US Mail, profit can only be realized when the response rate is over two percent. That is partly because there are costs associated with mailing an offer. These costs are much less when the costs are borne by the target, not the sender, as is the case with E‑mail. Therefore, the much lower return rate needed to realize a profit. If there were a way to make the sender bear the costs, there would be much less Spain. Sadly, Pat is correct in his assessment that anti‑spam laws will be useless with the world chopped up into all of the national jurisdictions that exist. A US law would have no impact in Taiwan and vice versa. He is also correct that there will always be scofflaws who will attempt (probably successfully) to circumvent the laws. However, to just throw up one's hands and say, "It's human nature and nothing can be done," is to be a defeatist. Something can and should be done. I return to the observation that the super‑giant corporations will bury those who trifle with their name and domains in lawsuits. That suggests that there we ways of identifying spammers even when they do all they can to conceal their true identities. The great weakness in the spammers' scheme is that, at some point, the message must lead to a means of contacting the spammer to purchase the product. There is an organization that controls the licensing of domain name re‑sellers worldwide. It is The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). They can, and should, begin aggressively revoking the licenses of those resellers who specialize in servicing spammers by providing them with forged headers and rapidly changing domain names in their messages. And don't try to tell me that there is no way to identify the true source of millions of the same message each day! At present ICANN's policy to the public is: "If you have a problem with one of the registrars, you should first try to resolve it with them. If you can't resolve you complaint with the registrar, you should address it to private‑sector agencies involved in addressing customer complaints or governmental consumer protection agencies. Although ICANN's limited technical mission does not include handling customer‑service issues, we do monitor complaints about registrars to discern trends. If you'd like to submit a complaint about a registrar to ICANN, please send an email to <registrar‑info@icann.org>. Please include your name, you company/organization (if any), your email address, your phone number (optional), the name of the registrar, the specific domain names involved (if any), and a brief description of you problem or complaint. ICANN will forward your complaint to the registrar for review and further handling." Note that there is absolutely no provision for revoking a registrar’s license! The assumption they make is that their registrars will abide by the ICANN policy of not participating in spamming activities. Sadly, not all of them do and the practice "will forward you complaint to the registrar for review and further handling" is tantamount to placing the fox as gourd of the hen house. I once filed such a complaint and the Spam I received literally doubled within a week! I was not terribly surprised the offending domain name owner and the registrar were the same individual! In Hong Kong! ICANN's statement "you should address it to private‑sector agencies involved in addressing customer complaints or governmental consumer protection agencies" is nothing less than a specious abdication of their ultimate responsibility for regulating the registrars. We are all quite well aware that there are no laws or governmental rules or consumer protection agencies that apply worldwide to whom one could address such a complaint. ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement says, "Registrar shall permit use of data it provides in response to queries for any lawful purposes except to: (a) allow, enable, or otherwise support the transmission by E‑mail, telephone, or facsimile of mass, unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations to entities other than the data recipient's own existing customers ...... Note that nothing at all is said regarding whatever Registrar culpability there may be. And even that nearly irrelevant prohibition has no enforcement provision. A this time there are only two reasons that ICANN gives for revoking a registrar's license: conviction in a court of law for a felony offense by the registrar company or company officer or failure to pay the minuscule $4000 annual license fee. At that low rate, a spammer can just re‑apply for a new license if one is revoked. Clearly ICANN sees no need to concern itself with what, to much of the world, is a major problem. Amazing, isn't it? Or would a better choice of word be "Outrageous!" In short, if ICANN can be pressured into stepping up to the plate and meeting its regulatory responsibilities, the spam problem could be a distant memory in a matter of months. I am not naive enough to believe that it can all be stopped, but I am sure that the 80% of messages I receive that are spam would be significantly reduced. Bill Taylor |
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