Smart Reporter Watch: You Mean They Exist?

By Ken Magill

Holy. Crap.

There may actually be a tech reporter out there whose head is not completely buried in his colon when it comes to what legislation can do in the fight against spam.

Dan Goodin a few weeks back published a piece in the UK’s Register reporting that an outfit called Find a Quote had been ordered to pay nearly $2.6 million to Asis in a lawsuit the small Internet service provider filed accusing Find a Quote of spamming its servers.

“Although it's questionable whether Asis Internet Services will ever see a penny of that windfall, the judgment is testament to the awesome power of CAN-SPAM, short for the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, which was passed by Congress in 2003,” wrote Goodin. ”It allows judgments of as much as $100 for every unsolicited email, and damages can be tripled for a variety of reasons.”

Wow. He gets it. I’m not alone.

Getting a little choked up here.

I feel a little like Rudolph the Reindeer’s Hermey the want-to-be-dentist elf felt when he found the Island of Misfit Toys.

Sniff. Sob.

I’ve been so alone in defending Can Spam for so long, I just don’t know what to say. Excuse me while I pull myself together.

OK, I’m back.

Obviously, Goodin didn’t get the memo that Can Spam is an anemic piece of marketer-friendly legislation that not only allows them to spam, it has encouraged it.

He clearly doesn’t understand that techies hate Can Spam because it is opt-out based, meaning marketers can legally send e-mail to folks unless they forbid it. As a result, Goodin has failed to realize he must ignore the fact that Can Spam has been leveraged in, oh, like a basquillion law-enforcement actions and resulted in millions upon millions of dollars in judgments against spammers.

Where was the obligatory line about how the enlightened Neteratti call the Can Spam Act the You Can Spam Act and that the volume of spam on the Internet has skyrocketed since it was enacted? Surely, his editor must have had a word with him over this gross piece of reporting negligence by now.

Message to Goodin: You better get your mind right, son, or you’re going to get drummed out of the corps.

But wait a minute. He must know all this, musn’t he? Could it be he was joking?

Nah. That would mean that he took the tech world’s mindless hatred of Can Spam to a new level and made an ignorant, snide comment in the face of hard evidence that Can Spam works just fine.

I choose to believe it wasn’t a joke.

Otherwise, I’m still alone.

Sniff.

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