| Comment Number: | 516736-00035 |
| Received: | 5/26/2005 11:51:06 AM |
| Organization: | |
| Commenter: | Russell Ault |
| State: | TX |
| Agency: | Federal Trade Commission |
| Rule: | Definitions, Implementation, and Reporting Requirements Under the CAN-SPAM Act |
| Docket ID: | 3084-AA96 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
The most significant issues that are currently not addressed are these: 1. Sale, lease, or other transfer of email addresses between advertisers or their agents without the acknowledged consent of the address owners for the specific transfer should be barred. 2. Sending unsolicited commercial email to an address without the express, advance, confirmed consent of the recipient should be barred. 3. Knowingly providing Internet access and/or support services to an entity that is engaged in acts in violation of CAN-SPAM should make the provider equally culpable and liable for prosecution. 4. Individual right of action and class action against the spammers needs to become a matter of law; it is clear that Attorneys General have too great a workload prosecuting more significant crimes, necessitating the enabling of independent actions to de-asset the spammers directly. 5. Ideally, RICO should be rewritten to recognize the involvement of organized criminal actions and acquiescent support via corrupt business entities in the spam problem, thus allowing another effective tool to be brought to bear. 6. The time from request for removal to actual removal from a bulk email list should be reduced to 24 hours. In this era of computer interconnection, even 2 hours is not an unreasonable deadline. 7. Domain owners should be statutorially enabled to declare their entire domain off-limits to unsolicited commercial email; ideally, this should be made a part of domain registration records via a "no UCE/with permission only/unrestricted if compliant at point of reception" field in the registration whois record at some future date. 8. Senders should be required to honor a mailer signal of NO_UCE returned as part of the connection process, and disconnect without sending any unsolicited commercial email at that point. The latter suggestions would be unnecessary if the first five were enacted and enforced.