WASHINGTON-Sending spam to wireless devices is illegal under rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission last week.
“The FCC shields consumers’ wireless devices from these unsolicited, costly and sometimes indecent messages,” said FCC Chairman Michael Powell. “This order strikes an effective balance between protecting consumers from unwanted messages, while minimizing the burden on senders of such messages.”
The FCC’s action is its portion of implementing the wireless provisions of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (Can Spam) Act of 2003, which became effective in January.
The Can Spam Act was modeled closely after the new Do-Not-Call registry in telemarketing legislation. As such, the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general have the authority to enforce new anti-spam guidelines.
The FCC is requiring wireless companies to register domain names-the words after the @ symbol-so that marketers can have access to that list. Those domain names would be off limits to commercial e-mail without the permission of the user. The permission can be either written or oral.
The FTC is examining how to define “commercial.” FCC officials declined to detail what may be considered spam. For example, political text messages could be legal since those messages are legal today under telemarketing rules.
The FCC also declined to comment as to how it will enforce its rules if violators are located offshore.
The wireless spam rules were adopted ahead of schedule. Congress mandated that rules be in place before the end of September.
“Congress gave this FCC 270 days to complete our work and we have done a thorough and thoughtful job in considerably less time,” said K. Dane Snowden, chief of the FCC’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau.
Verizon Wireless in June attempted to stop a group of wireless spammers by filing a lawsuit claiming that text messages marketing things like mortgages and ephedra violated not only the not-yet-implemented Can Spam Act, but the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The TCPA, which protects against junk faxes and telemarketing calls, makes it illegal to use an automatic dialer to call mobile phones.
Meanwhile the war against spam in the wireline world continues. America Online Inc. has bought Mailblocks Inc. for an undisclosed amount.
Mailblocks was the among the first to develop the challenge-response form of spam protection. Challenge response requires senders to be verified before their messages are passed through.
AOL plans to integrate Mailblocks into its e-mail service, which has about 30 million customers. Earthlink also uses a challenge-response system. Out of approximately 5 million users, about 673,000 use the blocking system.
While some complain that challenge response systems are cumbersome for both the sender and receiver of e-mail, proponents believe the method will catch on once it is deployed more widely.
