In a stark departure from tradition, Direct Marketing Association president and CEO H. Robert Wientzen says the DMA would support anti-spam legislation.
In a talk at the DMA annual conference in San Francisco last month, he said the association's board of directors voted in favor of federal legislation against unsolicited commercial e-mail.
Instead of starting from scratch, the group would work to “tweak” a bill already introduced, says Jerry Cerasale, DMA senior vice president for government affairs. A likely candidate would be Sen. Ron Wyden's Can-Spam Act of 2001 (S-630).
Fraudulent e-mail is already being handled by federal law enforcement agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, Cerasale says.
Any DMA-backed bill would reflect the association's e-mail guidelines, Cerasale says. It would also include provisions calling for consumers to give permission to receive the e-mail, and a subject line and header information that honestly reveals who the sender is and the purpose of the message — provisions in the Wyden bill.
Why is self-regulation not good enough anymore? “The amount of e-mail is getting so large that untargeted e-mail is pushing out legitimate e-mail,” Cerasale says.
Critics charge that the DMA's definition of spam is too limited, and that it should include all unsolicited e-mail. “The DMA's definition is that spam is any kind of e-mail that emanates from anyone who hasn't paid a DMA membership,” says Rodney Joffe, founder and chairman of Whitehat Inc., a Tempe, AZ-based direct marketing services firm.
“The vast majority of DMA members do the right thing,” Joffe says, adding that the association is making itself a “lightning rod” by taking this stand.
Meanwhile, with Congress preoccupied with the rumblings of war it is unlikely that any bill would pass during this session, Capitol Hill observers say.
