Ken Magill got his nose bent slightly out of joint in a post today about CAUCE’s support of a proposed anti-spam bill in Canada.
Here is what CAUCE had to say:
“An opt-out regime is what is made legal in America, by way of the CANSPAM act, and the United States is by far the main source of spam on the Internet today,” the letter said. “On the other hand, the drafters [of Canada’s bill C27] have carefully considered the laws of Australia and New Zealand, and the results are clear: neither of those countries now has much in the way of a home-grown spam problem after having adopted opt-in anti-spam laws.”
To this, Mr. Magill responded:
Consider the following:
Australia has 22 million people, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
New Zealand has 4.2 million people, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s World Fact Book.
This is compared to 305 million in the U.S.
According to Internet security firm Symantec, in the third quarter of 2009, botnets—or networks of infected computers—were responsible for 87.9% of all spam.
And Symantec may be right. But the issue isn’t about the spam that botnets are sending. CAUCE’s point had nothing whatsoever to do with botnets. Rather, their point concerned “a homegrown spam problem.” The homegrown nature is what they were attacking.
By Mr. Magill’s measure, though, India and China should both top the US in the number of spam issues given that both countries have larger populations than the US. Even if we just look at raw numbers of users, China still beats the US (338,000,000 Internet users in China, compared with 227,636,000 in the United States as of June 09). Yet, according to Spamhaus, the US has the largest number of spam problems (with more three times the number of issues of China, which sits at number two). And India doesn’t even make the top ten list as of this morning.
As much as I respect Ken Magill for taking the heat that he does writing the things he does, he just flat gets it wrong here.
About the Author
Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
