The Federal Trade Commission announced that the date on which commercial e-mailers must comply with CAN-SPAM-associated rules handed down December 16 has been moved from February 18 to March 28.
CAN-SPAM required the FTC to hand down regulations that define “relevant criteria to facilitate the determination of the primary purpose of an electronic mail message,” and the commission published a Federal Register notice of proposed rulemaking last August, seeking public comment, following an advance notice last March.
The rule in question would hold as commercial e-mail having only commercial advertising or promotion of products or services; e-mail having both commercial and “transactional or relationship content” if it could be “reasonably interpret(ed)” as commercial or if the “transactional/relationship” content wasn’t present in whole or part; and, e-mail with commercial content and content neither commercial nor transactional/relationship if a recipient could “reasonably” interpret the subject line or the message body to conclude it was commercial, the FTC said in a statement.
The Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs prompted the deadline change after holding that the FTC regulation proposals for defining the relevant criteria amounted to a “major” rule, under the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act.
“[We have] made no other modifications to either the text of the rule provisions themselves or the statement of basis and purpose describing and explaining the provisions, the record supporting them, and the Commission’s rationale in adopting them,” the FTC statement said.
