Even Declan McCullagh, one of the old school digerati, can’t bring himself to support government regulation to tackle spammers. The spam issue is where the instinctive libertarianism of many American online veterans runs into its hardest test case.
Here in Europe we have started to bring in anti-spam laws covering our own countries. Declan complains that “…so much of the stuff comes from overseas. Eighteen months ago, two of five Internet providers receiving the most spam complaints were based outside the country.” In other words, three of five spammers are based in the US! Surely a little regulation to make things hot for these miscreants would be welcome. Even if it didn’t make the problem go away it might at least mean a would-be spammer would have to make their way to an increasingly small number of “rogue states” where spamming is still legal…
