Spam hearing: E-mail tax, international treaty proposed

WASHINGTON - U.S. senators and others, including a self-professed spammer, offered several ideas for attacking spam with legislation, among them a small charge for sending e-mail and an international spam treaty, during a Senate hearing Wednesday.

Senator Mark Dayton, a Minnesota Democrat, recommended to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee that lawmakers approve a small charge per piece of e-mail sent. "I think it's worth looking at some very, very small charge for every e-mail sent, so small that it would not be onerous for an individual or business that has regular (e-mail) use, but it would be a deterrent for those who are sending millions and even billions of these e-mails," Dayton said.

In early March, Dayton introduced the "Computer Owners' Bill of Rights," which proposes creating a national antispam registry but does not include a charge for sending e-mail. But at the Wednesday hearing, Dayton suggested the e-mail tax, as well as a federal antispam SWAT team to combat growing amounts of unsolicited commercial e-mail in Internet users' in-boxes.

Dayton's ideas were among several advanced during the committee hearing, where the consensus seemed to be that something needs to be done about spam before it cripples the Internet. But few senators and witnesses could agree on what exactly should be done.

"What was a simple annoyance last year has become a major concern this year and could cripple one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century next year if nothing is done," said Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat who proposed an international spam treaty.

E-mail marketers trying to do the right thing by providing contact information and opt-out links are being driven underground by Internet service providers who kill their service after a few thousand complaints, said Ronald Scelson, operator of Scelson Online Marketing, based in Slidell, Louisiana.

Scelson's company was forced to disguise the sender information of the 180 million pieces of e-mail it sends out every day after one carrier shut him off after receiving 1,200 complaints, he said. But with a 1 percent response rate on the unsolicited commercial e-mail it sends out, far more people are buying the products advertised than complaining about the spam, he said.

"Why do more people buy than complain about it?" Scelson asked. "If (the mail you send is) 100 percent legal, and (Internet service providers) get a single complaint, they will turn around and kill your circuit, so we go out of business.or we're forced to forge the headers. The biggest complain is you can't find us. If you could, you're going to shut us down, so why should we let you find us?"

Scelson promised to work with Congress on any spam legislation. He claimed that some Internet service providers are adding to the estimated $10 billion cost of spam to U.S. businesses in 2003 by setting up spam filters that require bulk e-mailers to send one message at a time, eating up additional bandwidth at both ends of the e-mailing process. And Scelson suggested that outlawing most commercial e-mail amounts to censorship, and asked senators if they were planning to outlaw bulk postal mail as well.