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| Clearing the Junk off the Information Superhighway |
March 20, 2001 |
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CANNING THE SPAM: Heather recently joined people from New Mexico`s Internet Community to announce her anti-spam legislation, which will give consumers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) greater control over the unwanted e-mail that floods their inboxes.
Dear Friends,
A recent European Union report concluded that junk e-mail costs businesses and consumers $10 billion a year.
If you have an e-mail account and you haven`t been "spammed", you are a rare exception. It`s certainly an annoyance to delete the junk from your in box. But it also costs you money.
Because it costs about the same to send one e-mail as it does to send a million, junk e-mail floods the internet, causing the rt66.com`s and the unm.edu`s to expand their capacity to sort and distribute messages. As a subscriber, you pay for that.
But, to me, the cost is not the biggest problem. There is a dark side to the Internet and junk e-mail can bring that dark side to your in box and the in boxes of your children.
Read more about Heather`s Anti-Spam Bill:Albuquerque Tribune: State ISPs help Wilson craft anti-spam bill
Pornographers use junk e-mail a lot, sometimes with innocent sounding subject lines to entice the unwary.
As a parent, you can stop junk faxes, you can stop telemarketers, and you can even stop junk mail. But you have no power to stop junk e-mail for yourself or for your children.
I hope to give you that power. On Wednesday, the Commerce Telecommunications and the Internet subcommittee passed my bill on unsolicited commercial e-mail. It`s a good bill and it`s now going to the next step, which is consideration by the full Commerce Committee.
There`s a right of free speech on the Internet. But nobody has the right to force you to listen. I`ll keep you posted on the bill`s progress.
Wish you were here,
Heather |
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