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By Fred Fishkin / Bloomberg News
Symantec Corp., the world's biggest maker of anti-virus and anti-spam software, says the U.S. Senate is taking the wrong approach to halt the deluge of unwanted e- mail, or spam.
I don't think it's enforceable, Symantec Chairman and Chief Executive John Thompson said about a proposal to create a do-not-spam registry, to let computer users block billions of pieces of unsolicited e-mail peddling pornography, virility pills or get-rich-quick offers. It provides a hollow, false promise to consumers, he said in an interview.
Microsoft Corp., the world's biggest software maker, said Monday that it's making computer security against viruses and spam its top priority and bringing out more products for the fight. Spam now accounts for about 45 percent of global e-mail traffic, said Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
The Senate proposal was added to a bill last month that would bar spammers from disguising their identities and using misleading subject lines to attract attention. The bill provides for fines and imprisonment for as long as five years for sending illegal e- mail.
Shares of Symantec, the maker of Norton programs, fell $1 to $60.35 at 4:30 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading.
An alternative approach is to shift the cost of unsolicited e- mail back to spammers, the senders of high-volume e-mail solicitations, by requiring them to pay to send e-mail marketing messages, said Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., director of technology policy at the Cato Institute, a public-policy research group in Washington.
Such an approach could be managed by Internet service providers, Symantec's Thompson said.
The best solution is for technology infrastructure providers to ix it, Thompson said. But they need to change their business model. (Spam) won't get fixed by legislation.
The problem with spam is that e-mail is cheap to send, and under the current system, users can't authenticate senders to prevent unwanted messages from arriving, Crews said in an interview. The great thing about the Internet is you can contact anyone with it; the bad thing is they can contact you back.
Now that commercial e-mail is overtaking other uses, the original model for e-mail exchange may not still work, Crews said. That's what the industry has to decide, he said.
No matter what legislators do, they can't solve the fundamental problem of the low cost of sending e-mail and the lack of authentication, Crews said. If you can shift those costs back to the sender of e-mail, the spam goes away.
detnews.com
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