The question before the cyberhouse seems to be, more and more, whether the cure will prove worse than the disease when it comes to fighting spam by way of lawmaking.
There are those Internet advocates, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who fear that anti-spam legislation with provisions like centralized blacklists and charging for delivery could end up meaning the destruction of e-mail. Others fear that proposals to ban masking a sender's identity could hurt more than just spammers – like political dissidents reaching out from countries with repressive governments, according to Wired.
EFF head counsel Cindy Cohn told Wired anti-spam advocates tend to forget the principle of information flowing freely end-to-end, which she called the Internet's "first" principle.
The EFF believes spam blocking comes down to one proposition: "All non-spam e-mail should be delivered." Wired calls it the information superhighway's equivalent of the Hippocratic oath requiring doctors first to do no harm. And Cohn said imprudent spam blocking could create severe consequences.
"It's not the job of an ISP to block e-mail," Cohn told Wired. "E-mail isn't a toy anymore. If I don't get an e-mailed notice from the federal district court mailing list, it's malpractice."
trimMail Inbox spokesman Brian Gillette, whose product is an anti-spam device, told the magazine e-mail blocking is folly. "If I'm an ISP and I stop a $150,000 equipment sale because I decided it was spam, I'm in for a lawsuit," he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union fears anti-spam legislation could put too much of people's ability to speak anonymously online at risk, while at least one Federal Trade Commissioner, Howard Beale, recently told members of Congress that spam threatened to destroy e-mail. The EFF has actually been victimized by overbroad spam filters, Wired said, with the group's newsletter getting bounced by such filters, once because the word "rape" was included in an article about an online group against prison rape.
Other critics of pending anti-spam legislation have said that anti-spam legislation without opt-in allowances will only give the spammers a little more leeway, since opt-out, these critics say, is a lot easier to bypass than if they're caught dishonoring an opt-in request.
