One spam bill was sent out of the Business and Professions Committee to the California state Assembly's floor July 1, a second spam bill was stalled in the same committee, and the state Senator who wrote the latter bill blames Microsoft for the stall. But the committee can still consider the bill later in the term.
That senator, Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), was nothing if not emphatic in her reaction: "And on the first day of July, (the) Assembly committee proclaims, "Let There Be Spam!" she thundered to begin an official statement on the stall.
Bowen's SB 12 would have required spammers to get computer users' permission before sending them spam and fined the spammers $500 per spam message. Bowen claimed the committee was "urged on" by Microsoft, which lately has entered its own litigation against reputed spammers, including a pair of adult Internet companies, Xpays and Global Media.
“Does anyone other than the eight members of this committee who either voted ‘no’ or took a walk on the bill really believe Microsoft has any interest in getting rid of spam?,” Bowen said in her statement. “Trusting Microsoft to protect computer users from spam is like putting telemarketers in charge of the do-not-call list."
The bill which the Business and Professions Committee sent to the floor, by state Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles), also calls for spammers to be fined, but at $1,000 per spam or $1,000,000 per "incident," whichever was less, according to the bill's language after it was modified to answer an analysis from the state legislature's nonpartisan summary.
"Late attachments" to the bill, Bowen said, also put a burden of proof of "actual damages" on the spam recipients. This bill was said to have been supported by Microsoft, Yahoo, and the American Electronics Association, among others. Bowen also predicted those "late attachments" would mean a bumpy road through the full Assembly once other members "see what went into this bill this morning."
Bowen's bill needed seven votes to go to the Assembly floor. It got five yes votes and two no votes, with six committee members including chairman Lou Correa (D-Anaheim) refusing to vote.
"Microsoft uses a megaphone to tell everyone how much it hates spam at the same time it’s working overtime to kill truly tough anti-spam laws. Why?" Bowen asked. Then, she answered: "Microsoft doesn’t want to ban spam, it wants to decide what’s ‘legitimate’ or ‘acceptable’ unsolicited commercial advertising so it can turn around and license those e-mail messages and charge those advertisers a fee to wheel their spam into your e-mail inbox without your permission.”
Murray had not yet made any comment or statement on his bill going to the Assembly floor.
Bowen, who modeled her anti-spam bill on the federal junk fax ban, said the same standard should be imposed upon spam. "Spam isn’t legitimate advertising and it’s not free speech," she said. "It’s basically high-tech junk faxing that forces e-mail users to pay for someone else’s advertising campaign through slower computer service and higher Internet access fees.”
For their part, Microsoft told reporters they thought Bowen's objection also hooked around a portion of the Murray bill she thought exempted Internet service providers – like Microsoft's MSN or Hotmail e-mail service - from prosecution over spam going through their system but which they didn't originate.
"It is not our intent to try to use the protection we have as an ISP for not being held liable for passing messages through our system," Microsoft spokesman Sean Sundwall told reporters in calling Bowen's supposed objection false. "In Murray's bill, ISPs are not shot for being the messenger. So what she's hinting at there is that now that we have that protection, it can pass through to us even if we send the spam. But that's not going to happen, and we will use every resource we have to make sure that is resolved in future iterations of the bill."
