Although the EU has already passed a 2002 Directive dealing in part with unsolicited commercial e-mail, it has not been an overwhelming success. Nine Member States have still to implement the law and those that met the October 2003 deadline have taken an inconsistent approach.
With spam now amounting to an estimated 50% of all European e-mail, the Commission is looking at spam anew. Yesterday it published a Communication calling for tougher sanctions against spammers.
"Legislation alone will not halt spam", Enterprise and Information Society Commissioner Erkki Liikanen acknowledged. He went on to identify a series of proposed actions, including effective enforcement by Member States and public authorities, technical and self-regulatory solutions by industry, consumer awareness, and international cooperation.
Examples include providing competent authorities with the required investigation and enforcement powers to trace and prosecute spammers, adapting marketing practices to the opt-in regime (current UK rules refer to prior-consent which is not the same thing), and explaining to users how to avoid spam and what filtering and security can do for them.
The international dimension is also essential, since most spam comes from outside the European Union. Besides bilateral contacts with, for example, the US, the Commission is hosting a workshop on spam at the beginning of February to explore possible solutions at international level.
The Commission will also investigate how best to follow up the results of the United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society in relation to spam.
The Commission will monitor the implementation of these actions during 2004 and will assess whether additional or corrective action is needed by the end of 2004.
The Commission is not the only body to urge stronger action against spam. Bill Gates reiterated his desire to tackle the problem at a conference in Switzerland last week, and, according to Associated Press, declared that spam will be dead within two years.
His vision came in three parts:
Better spam filters and sender authentication systems;
The slowing of e-mails from unknown senders to make it difficult to bulk e-mail; and
A fee payable if the e-mail recipient thinks the e-mail is spam.
"In the long run, the monetary [method] will be dominant," Gates told the conference, according to AP.
Gates is not the first to suggest a fee for e-mail. Tim Bray, CTO of Antartica Systems and part-time blogger, put forward a similar suggestion, for a "relayer" solution. The idea that he and other technology experts came up with is that you open an account with an organisation that acts as an e-mail relayer. Sending an e-mail would cost $0.01. The relayer stops you sending more than, say, 100 e-mails in a day without an e-mail exchange to verify that you are not a spammer.
Bray explains:
"Every e-mail that it sends it signs digitally. Then, you set up your e-mail client to send all e-mail that hasn't been signed by [the company] or one of its competitors (there couldn't be more than a couple of hundred) to the junk folder. Then you tell your friends to go and sign up with one of these guys if they want you to get their mail."
Bray argues that this would solve all the problems of spam for a mere penny per e-mail; there would be no loss of anonymity; it would still allow communication between strangers and it would kill off spam because spammers work on such tight margins that they could no longer afford to operate.
Says Bray, "The nice thing about this system is that everything works about the way it does now. You send mail with SMTP [Simple Mail Transfer Protocol] and you read it with whatever you read it with. Building the server infrastructure and making the client modifications to get this working could be the work of weeks, not months."