Communications Law Commons^™

An Architecture For Spam Regulation, David Dickinson

Federal Communications Law Journal

Junk email, commonly referred to as "spam," is the current scourge of the Internet. In late 2004, unwanted email messages were being delivered at a rate of 12.4 billion per day. The variety of tools used to combat spam have failed to make a significant impact. Legislative efforts, such as the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, met with substantial enforcement complications. The communications industry responded with a variety of technical advances, such as filters and blacklists, but those innovations are still unable to reliably distinguish between wanted and unwanted messages. Real coordination between legislative and technical spam control tactics has yet …