The Marketing Technology Blog

The FTC has shut down quite a few spammers lately. Spam is still a huge issue, I get hundreds of messages a day. I could filter the emails (I used to use MailWasher) but gave up. There are other alternatives - using a SPAM service that requires each person get authorized to email me, but I like being accessible.

Now the problem spreads. I get Comment and Trackback Spam on my blog. Every day, I login and there are 5 to 10 messages that Akismet hasn’t caught. No fault of theirs - their service has caught over 4,000 comments SPAMs on my blog.

When will the FTC get involved with other types of SPAM aside from email? I think a great comparison is this… I buy a store on a great street with lots of traffic. As soon as I move in and the SPAM shop down the street finds me, they want to get some of my customers. So - they stick up posters on my store’s window advertising their store. They don’t ask me permission - they just do it.

It’s like someone hanging a poster on my storefront advertising his store. Why isn’t that illegal?

In the real world, I’d be able to stop this. I could ask the person to stop, get the police to ask them to stop, or ultimately I could sue them or press charges. However, on the Internet, I can’t do that. I know the address of the SPAMMER… I know his domain (Where he lives). How come I can’t shut him down? It seems to me that we should be afforded the same criminal and civil actions that we are provided had my storefront (blog) been a real street address.

It’s time to expand the legislation and put some technology behind these laws. I think SPAMMER IP’s should be blocked on an ongoing basis from name servers throughout the world. If people could not get to them, they would stop.