Microsoft, Symantec differ on antispam efforts in Congress

IDG News Service - In a sign of the difficulty facing federal lawmakers as they craft antispam legislation, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates and Symantec Corp. CEO John Thompson have offered starkly different plans for combating the problem.
The plans were outlined in letters submitted by to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which held hearings today to solicit input on the spam problem.
Writing to U.S. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Fritz Hollings, (D-S.C.), the chairman and ranking Democrat on the committee, Gates said that spam, or unsolicited commercial e-mail, costs businesses billions of dollars each year and is eroding public trust in technology. "[Spam] is decreasing our collective ability to realize technology's full potential," Gates wrote.
While trumpeting Microsoft's investment in antispam technology for its MSN Online and Exchange and Outlook application customers, Gates downplayed the idea of a technological fix to the spam problem. "There is no silver-bullet solution to the problem," he wrote.
Instead, Gates advocated a multifaceted approach involving new legislation, increased enforcement of existing laws and a healthy dose of technology industry self-regulation.
The centerpiece of Gates' antispam plan is a proposal to establish global independent trust authorities that would certify legitimate e-mail solicitations, champion best practices and serve as a mediating body for customer disputes. Legitimate e-mail solicitation companies would receive a "seal" identifying them as trusted senders.
Rather than creating a complicated new body of laws regarding spam, federal legislation should indemnify Internet service providers from blocking spam and pursuing spammers, while providing incentives for e-mail marketers to adopt best practices, Gates wrote.
For example, the federal government could set up a "safe harbor" program that would absolve online marketers that participate in self-regulatory organizations from complying with more onerous antispam laws, such as labeling spam e-mail messages with "ADV," Gates suggested.
Symantec's Thompson took a different tack in his letter to the committee.
Although the letter detailed the damage Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec has suffered from fraudulent spam messages offering discounted versions of the company's software, Thompson's recipe for fighting spam shied away from proposing radical changes to current antispam measures.
Instead, he stuck to incremental and so-called common-sense proposals such as increasing enforcement of existing fraud laws and beefing up the prosecutorial staff at the Federal Trade Commission. Greater deployment of antispam filtering software by Internet service providers, better consumer education and a uniform federal antispam law to replace fragmented state laws would all help reduce spam, he said.
Neither Gates nor Thompson spoke in person at the hearing, where executives from AmericaOnline Inc. and antispam company Brightmail Inc. joined representatives from the marketing and advertising industries and privacy advocates to voice concerns about the spam problem and the various proposals circulating on Capitol Hill.