So you couldn't afford a ticket to the recent FTC Spam Forum? Well, you missed a once-in-a-lifetime event. The feds brought an amazing collection of ISPs, e-marketers, lawyers, technoweenies, and antispam activists to Washington, D.C., to discuss the scourge of the Net. They even managed to lure a few spammers to the meeting rooms on New Jersey Avenue, though they didn't stay long. Meanwhile, I spotted some side stories on the q.t.--strictly hush-hush.

The politicos vs. the public
A good politician can sniff out a photo op miles away. Even before the FTC conference got started, we were treated to surprise appearances from Senators Conrad Burns (R-Montana) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose, California), all touting their respective antispam bills before the cameras. Unfortunately, the Burns-Wyden CAN-SPAM Act is a stinky piece of cheese that's been moldering in Congress for years; it provides criminal penalties for e-mail fraud but preempts a lot of better laws and does nothing to address bulk unsolicited mail that isn't falsified. Yet this is the law that's supposed to save us from spam. Lofgren's idea--which involves labeling spam as advertising and paying people to turn in violators--is slightly better, but not much.

The shyster vs. the commish
Two weeks before the forum, a South Florida attorney named Mark Felstein filed suit against a dozen antispammers on behalf of a somewhat vaporous nonprofit called eMarketersAmerica.org. The suit claimed that the antispammers had interfered with his clients' ISP contracts and unfairly blocked their e-mail; however, Felstein has so far refused to name any members of the group who suffered this damage.

The nattily attired Felstein attended the FTC Spam Forum and got into a bit of a scuffle with one of the defendants in the case, Adam Brower. Eyewitnesses say no punches were thrown, but it took FTC Commissioner (and retired Marine Lieutanant Colonel) Orson Swindle to break it up.

The pit bull vs. the pip-squeak
You can have Johnny Cochrane; if I'm ever in a legal wrangle--or a bar fight--I'd want Pete Wellborn on my side. The Atlanta-based attorney won a $24 million judgment for EarthLink against a spammer last July and a nearly $17 million award last week, yet he's only just begun to fight. Wellborn sat on the panel that addressed litigation issues and says his goal is to "send the message that if you spam through an ISP that forbids it, you'll suffer the financial death penalty." He also added that the idea of a group such as eMarketersAmerica suing antispammers is "like a burglar suing you because you put a lock on your door."

The DMA vs. the world
There's one group that thinks the Burns-Wyden antispam bill is a swell idea: the Direct Marketing Association. The DMA would dearly love to get rid of the so-called shifty 150--that is, the 100 to 200 spammers who account for 90 percent of the junk that's sent--so that its members can fill your in-boxes with their own ads.

DMA president Robert Weintzen sat on the first panel of the conference. When asked why his group was opposed to permission-based marketing, he said that there's no way to get solicited mail without first sending unsolicited mail, which elicited boos and hisses from the crowd.

Afterward, I saw him in the lobby. "You were kind of outnumbered in there," I said, gesturing toward the meeting room. "In there, yeah," said Weintzen, then pointed to the door leading out onto New Jersey Avenue. "Out there, no."

I'm not sure if he meant the world at large or the more insular one of Washington. If he was talking about the world, then I know he's wrong. But if he meant the other, well, one can only hope.

ISP Q&A

Question: Recently, I visited MSN's sign-up page. The page loaded fine, but there was just one problem: it was in French. When I reloaded the page, it came back in English. I asked a friend across the country to try this, and he had the same experience. What do you think happened?



Answer: That's a good one. Many sites localize their page content for different regions of the globe, but they're generally pretty good at figuring out which one to serve. I guess one of MSN's Web servers got its pages crossed. I asked the folks at Microsoft how this could have happened, and they had absolutely no idea. C'est un mystère.