Spam becomes political meat
Spam becomes political meat
Spam became a political issue today. The Federal Government is supporting a campaign launched today by the Internet Industry Association. The IIA Anti Spam Campaign wants to put a stop to spam and claims it is damaging the development of the Internet in Australia.
Announcing a National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) report on spam as part of the kick off for the campaign the Internet Industry Association (IIA) claimed that over a billion spam email messages were sent to Australian's last year.
As part of the campaign the IIA is offering anti-spam tools to users for free for a month. IIA chief Peter Coroneos said "We can reduce spam to a manageable level. We want Internet users to know that there are options for controlling this scourge."
"Spam is clogging the arteries of the Internet, polluting the medium with pornography and scams and stealing bandwidth from ordinary Australians," Senator Alston the minister for communications information technology and the arts said in a statement. In the statement the senator said the government would consider legislation banning spam.
Amongst the plans set out by the IIA include the banning of sending emails without prior consent and creating a consent system. Other plans include; emails to contain accurate descriptions of their content, a code of practice, Internet service providers (ISP) to offer filtering software and an awareness campaign.
In a statement the IIA said, "Australians are heartily sick of spam emails touting black market drugs, celebrity porn, bogus prizes, Nigerian money laundering and other false and or fraudulent material."
A raft of vendors has signed up to the action plan. Ex-ISP head Sean Howard, who launched Ozemail, said, "It is up to us to protect our borders and ensure the integrity of email is maintained." While MessageLabs is happy to see the IIA take the spam initiative. "Today's technology has the capability to defeat the growing menace of spam," Nick Hawkins the director for the Asia Pacific region said.
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