Congress approved a bill Monday outlawing some of the most annoying forms of junk e-mail and creating a "do not spam" registry.
By a voice vote, the House approved the bill containing jail time and multimillion-dollar fines for online marketers who flood e-mail inboxes with pornography and get-rich-quick schemes. The measure, which cleared the Senate last month, now goes to the White House where President Bush is expected to sign it into law by the end of the year. "For the first time during the Internet era, American consumers will have the ability to say no to spam," House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin, a Louisiana Republican, said in a statement. "What"s more, parents will be able to breath easier knowing that they have the ability to prevent pornographic spam from reaching defenseless, unsuspecting children," he said. Since the first spam bill was introduced in Congress in 1998, unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam, has grown from a nuisance to a plague that threatens to overwhelm the Internet"s most popular means of communication.
Spam now makes up more than half of all e-mail, according to several surveys, and even online marketers have come to support some restrictions. The bill would not outlaw all unsolicited commercial e-mail. Businesses could send messages to anyone with an e-mail address as long as they identified themselves clearly and honored consumer requests to leave them alone. But the bill would ban a variety of favorite spammer tactics, such as using false return addresses. Pornographic e-mail would have to be clearly labeled, and commercial "text messages" to cell phones would be prohibited unless users expressly permitted them. The bill also would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to set up a "Do Not Spam" registry of Internet users who wish to receive no unsolicited e-mail at all, similar to the agency"s popular "Do Not Call" telemarketing list.