What comes as a disappointing decision by the Bush administration is that there are no immediate plans to create a national do-not-spam list. One of the reasons that impacted this decision was the fear that it might generate more unsolicited sales pitches across the web. Expanding on that reason was that since the registry is used to identify accounts certain information could be send. One example of misuse would be that pedophiles could send information targeted towards children according to the paper released Tuesday.
The Bush administration will not immediately create a national do-not-spam registry to discourage unwanted e-mails, saying using current technology to do so might generate even more unsolicited sales pitches across the Internet, according to documents obtained Tuesday.
The Federal Trade Commission, expected to announce its decision later in the day, said it feared that unscrupulous senders of unwanted e-mails would mine such a registry of e-mail addresses looking for new victims, according to a summary of the FTC"s decision obtained by The Associated Press. The commission, which was obligated to consider the proposal under the "can spam" legislation that Bush signed in December, concluded that it would be "largely powerless to identify those responsible for misusing the registry."
Regulators instead proposed broad adoption of new authentication technology that will make it more difficult to disguise the origin of unwanted e-mails. Several proposals from leading technology companies, including Microsoft Corp., are under industry consideration. "A national do-not-e-mail registry, without a system in place to authenticate the origin of e-mail messages, would fail to reduce the burden of spam and may even increase the amount of spam received by consumers," the commission said.