Worldwide Help Needed to Stop Spam
Despite the differing laws, countries need to work together, experts say.
Paul Meller,
IDG News Service

Governments around the world are being urged to cooperate more in their fight against the proliferation of spam.

We need a coordinated international drive to maintain consumer and business confidence in the Internet, said OECD deputy secretary-general Herwid Schlogl at a conference Monday organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The conference, held in Brussels, comes at a time when spam accounts for over half of all e-mails in circulation--and it is occurring on the heels of the Mydoom spam viruses, which have polluted millions of computers around the world in the past week.

Governments of the 30 developed countries in the OECD should work together to improve law enforcement, the organization says in a report prepared for the conference. They can also use their spending power as a carrot to encourage suppliers to develop more effective antispam protection systems, it says.

For the Internet to go on growing as a viable commercial medium, users must have confidence in its security and usability, Schlogl said, adding that spam threatens to erode consumer confidence online, which in turn would undermine the digital economy and the open character of the Internet as a whole.

The call for better international coordination was picked up by many government officials attending the two-day conference. Mozelle Thompson, a commissioner at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, says the U.S. is already cooperating with other countries. Last week 27 countries including the U.S. launched an initiative called Operation Secure Your Server, Thompson says.


Too Soft?
However, the U.S. was criticized for adopting a softer regulatory approach to fighting spam than the European Union. The U.S. has an 'opt out' approach, which means that a computer user must choose to be excluded from any unsolicited mass-e-mailings. E.U. law, which is in the process of being adopted in all 15 countries in the Union, forbids people from sending unsolicited e-mails unless the recipients have expressly opted in to that mailing list.

The different approach taken on either side of the Atlantic doesn't help develop an international approach to combating spam, says European Commissioner for the information society, Erkki Liikanen.

Thompson says that too much is being made of the differing legislative approaches. Most of the spam we are seeing is so bad that the question of opt-in or opt-out isn't part of the question, he says. Instead of focussing on our differences we should focus on what we have in common, which is a spam problem, he adds...................................

More at PCWorld