California Lawmaker Zaps Microsoft, Congress On Spam

A state senator whose anti-spam bill was defeated in favor of a competing bill Microsoft among others supported has blasted Microsoft for "talking out of both sides of their mouth," while concurrently criticizing Congress for presenting little more than a series of legislative proposals that are "worse than nothing" for fighting spam.

"If Microsoft was against spam, it would have supported a bill like (mine) that require(d) permission before unsolicited commercial e-mail gets delivered into someone's mailbox," said state Sen. Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), in a September 3 interview with CNET.com. "Instead, they danced around with all this stuff about how only scammers are spammers and how, if they've been paid the postage stamp, that it's somehow no longer spam."

By "paid the postage stamp," Bowen alluded to Bill Gates's previously-expressed support for a self-regulating system which the senator says is nothing more than Microsoft "becom(ing)…the post office for spam" by charging their customers for spam-blocking, since Microsoft has spoken in the past about concepts like licensing spammers.

"I think we are making this far too complicated," the senator told CNET.

 Bowen also said Congressional proposals to fight spam will actually do anything but, and that opt-out provisions such as those in most of the Capitol Hill bills will make the problem even worse.

"They legitimize spam, and they put the burden on computer users to deal with it," she said. "It does this despite having certain knowledge that most spammers are hard to track down, don't maintain opt-out lists and move their e-mail addresses all the time.

They basically expect that spammers are going to become good boys and girls and keep a list of everyone that's asked to be removed from their spam lists, and I think they are extremely naive. We need to go the other way. People need to have control over their in-boxes, and we need a national permission-based standard."

Bowen's original anti-spam state Senate bill would also have slapped mandatory fines of $500 per message on verified spammers. She told CNET most of her bill has since been integrated into another state Senate bill due for a state Assembly vote before returning to the Senate this fall.