The Federal Trade Commission wants more public comments on clarifying or modifying some definitions and terms in the still-controversial CAN-SPAM Act.
The FTC published a Federal Register notice May 16 asking for comment on proposed new rulemaking under the act, including defining "person," since it is "used repeatedly throughout the act but not defined there"; modifying "sender's" definition to make it easier to isolate who would be responsible for CAN-SPAM opt-out compliance; clarifying that post office and private mailboxes equal "valid physical postal addresses within the meaning" of CAN-SPAM; cutting from 10 to three days the time senders have to honor opt-out requests; and barring recipient requirements to pay fees or offer information in order to submit valid opt-out requests.
The new notice is a follow-up to an advance notice of proposed rulemaking the FTC submitted in March, the agency said in its announcement, with that comment period expiring last month.
The FTC said the first comment period resulted in 13,517 comments and suggestions from a range of people that included e-commerce workers, trade association representatives, consumers, and consumer and privacy advocates. Though the agency has yet to disclose what some of those suggestions actually were, the FTC said the new proposed rules were based in large part on those first-period comments.
CAN-SPAM took effect January 1, 2004, and has been controversial from the beginning of its legislative process, in large part because its use of opt-out rather than opt-in, according to numerous critics, means that spammers still have an open field in which to launch and flush their spam.
"In its 17 months of existence, it's done very little to stem the tide of spam clogging our email in boxes," said Forbes writer Arik Hesseldahl in a May 17 piece. "When last I checked, spam still constituted more than half of the email sent on the Internet. And in March of this year, a few senators got all fired up about phishing With luck, they haven't found a way to make the problem worse by passing the bill they naively think will make the problem go away."
Spamhaus.org, the British-based spam-fighting group, has routinely derided the law, especially because of the opt-out provision, as the YOU-CAN-SPAM Act.
The FTC also hopes to get comments on other subjects raised in the first-period comments, even though they're not yet going to be considered for rule making. Those include the CAN-SPAM definition of "transactional or relationship message(s)," the FTC view on how or whether CAN-SPAM applies to "certain email marketing practices" including "forward to a friend" campaigns, and FTC efforts not to name additional "aggravated violations" to the act.
