EC calls for legal action against spammers

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 27 Nov 2006 at 17:51

The European Commission has called on member states to take aggressive legal action against spam.

The EC says in a new Communication that in spite of the high priority of spam on the agendas of interested parties, concern has yet to boil down into action. It says that existing legislation gives regulatory bodies all the tools they need to take spammers to court, and points to prosecutions in the Netherlands as an example of how legal action can cut into spam levels.

'It is time to turn the repeated political concern about spam into concrete actions to fight spam,' said Viviane Reding Commissioner for Information Society and Media. 'In line with EU legislation outlawing spam, the Dutch authorities have managed to cut domestic spam by 85 per cent - I'd like to see other countries achieving similar results through more efficient enforcement. I will revisit this issue again next year to see whether additional legislative measures against spam are required.'

The Dutch prosecutions were undertaken by small spam-fighting outfit OPTA, which has just five full-time staff and less than half a million pounds of equipments.

The Communication cites Messagelabs' claims that spam still makes up around 85 per cent of email traffic. However, Messagelabs itself was sceptical about the EC's own figures regarding the success of the OPTA legal action.

Its figures show that the Netherlands is well down in the chart of spam levels in European countries at number 16 and that current levels show 51 per cent of email traffic is spam for the month of November. This is down from the 59.1 per cent for October but up on the September figure of 48 per cent.

'An 85 per cent reduction in domestic spam is commendable however attention should now be focused on protection from the most active and thus dangerous sources. In the September MessageLabs Intelligence Report, we revealed the top ten countries responsible for botnet activities - the Netherlands was not one of them. The worst offenders included: US, China, Uruguay, India, UK, France, Germany, Brazil, Poland and Taiwan,' said a spokesperson for the company.

The EC will also look again at existing legislation in order to strengthen the provisions that protect the privacy and security of EU citizens. This may introduce changes that mean that service providers have to make public any breaches of security that lead to loss of data or interruptions of services.

National regulatory bodies will be able to force service providers to meet security standards and allow third parties to use regulatory bodies as a route to prosecution for infringements of the ePrivacy Directive.