Comments:

Re: CAN-SPAM Act Rulemaking, Project No. R411008 To the Commissioners, I appreciate your efforts to curb unsolicited bulk email. However I am very concerned about the ramifications of your decision. I encourage you to take your time and delay this decision to do more research. My issues are with your requirements for opt-out. The internet is full of independent business owners. We do not currently have a method for opting out across ALL independent business owners. Let me provide an example. I am an independent telecommunications and internet consultant. I resell services from well known companies such as MCI, Sprint, and Verizon. I am however an independent business owner. There are thousands more telecommunications consultants like me. The problem here is that there are two seperate parties involved. I as a telecommunications consultant, and the company I resell. In some cases there may even be 3 parties involved. I may be a consultant to a reseller of a provider for example. That is 3 levels of people who need to be notified. If your law says that when someone opts out of my messages, they opt out of all MCI messages... That is a VERY DIFFICULT task. That is extremely time consuming and costly mechanism. MCI would need to develop some system where all resellers and consultants can scrub their lists. With a 10 day opt out requirement that means as an independent consultant I need to scrub my list at least 3 times a month, probably weekly to be safe. In addition it may be that the individual merely wants to opt-out of my consulting services, they may not want to opt out of MCI entirely. Yet further, I resell 40 different providers. When someone opts out of my service do I have to ask specifically for each of my 40 providers if they wish to opt-out? Then do I have to notify all 40 providers? Then do I have to scrub my list for each of my 40 providers? That is extremely complicated. I do not think your interpretation of opting-out for an enitre product/brand is effective. It would be very costly to small independent business owners like myself. I do agree that we need to find a solution but I do not think one person opting out of MCI related emails should be responsible for notifying all of the thousands of independent MCI resellers, distributors, and consultants. In addition if there were such broad opt-out lists it would make it extremely easy for unscrupulous individuals to attack the users of that list. A dishonest reseller could download the MCI scrub list and market them Sprint services instead. This would simply lead to more headache and very costly enforcement on behalf of the government. One other thing that concerns me. Forward to a friend. Once again you are trying to regulate something that is intangible. How can I be blamed for one of my customers who forwards an email message to a friend? The problem is that the act of forwarding a message to a friend does NOT require them to hit my server. Since they can forward a message by simply clicking a button ON THEIR COMPUTER, I am not involved in this transaction at all! They do not hit my server, so I cannot "scrub" them against my list of opt-out users. An example: I'm a telecommunications consultant. Business owner Tom Smith likes my services. He takes an email from me, and clicks on the "forward" button on his PC. He then forwards it to 3 of his friends who are also business owners because he thinks they might like my services. This transaction takes place entirely on Tom Smith's PC. His email software does NOT check with me to see if that user is on an opt-out list. So what happens if one of Tom's friends has opted out of my services? Or has opted out of MCI entirely? Does all email software need to be rewritten? Am I to be blamed for a transaction I am not involved in at all? How is this enforceable? Respectfully, Benjamin D. Fitts Boston, MA Republican Voter