Wildlist reorganization meets with approval

If nothing happens before October, the odds go down significantly, " Schwartz says. " I'd say there's a good chance, over 50 percent. " Common solution is a common problem One of the provisions contained in most of the proposed legislation is a requirement that commercial email be labeled as such. While this might seem a fairly simple requirement on the surface, it is fraught with both lo-gistical and legal peril, observers say. " The only point of creating an advertising label is to segregate spam from non-spam so that every ISP would automatically delete 'Adv' when it comes in, " Sorkin says. " From the ISPs point of view, you still have to receive the SMTP session, so you still have a little bandwidth cost, but you don't have to route it inward. If that only covers unsolicited bulk mail or commercial mail, then fine, you can delete it all. But if it also covers opt-in messages, or transactional messages, then you can't delete it all and it's pointless. The legitimate mar-keters fear is that if their messages have to be labeled, and the spammers are ignoring the requirement anyway, it's not going to do any good and it will just interfere with legitimate traffic. " Geissler also thinks the requirement could be deemed unconstitu-tional on freedom of speech grounds. " It's too difficult to determine what is advertising, " he says. " If I'm somebody who belongs to a small political party and I'm selling, on the side, my handbook on how to be an independent libertarian in the Adirondacks, for example, I'm probably making some money off of that, but the essence of my communication is that I want to get my political point of view across. " There's just too much gray area to establish a black-letter rule on what needs to be labeled and therefore restricted. " The significance of this, he says, is that the law would create a chilling effect on those who send those gray-area messages, and could very likely be deemed as a restraint on free speech. While a federal law would presumably preempt existing and often inconsistent state antispam laws, international acceptance of a US law also might meet philosophical hurdles. In many cases, the Federal Trade Commission would have authority, under trade agreements, to enforce laws against offshore spammers. However, the European Union's antispam regulations call for " opt-in …