12:14 PM ET 10/01/98
Marketers push to fight ``spam,'' protect kids on Net
By Hester Abrams
EDINBURGH, Oct 1 (Reuters) - Marketers want industrial
nations meeting in Ottawa next week to adopt a global system to
protect consumers from junk e-mail, which a top marketer on
Thursday called the ``cancer of electronic commerce.''
Direct marketing experts meeting separately in San Francisco
next week hoped to agree a global code of practice to protect
children using the Internet from straying onto unsuitable sites,
said Colin Lloyd, chief executive of Britain's Direct Marketing
Association.
``We are trying to lay the foundations to develop an e-mail
preference service globally, for consumers to opt out of
receiving unwanted e-mail solicitations,'' he told Reuters.
``We don't want to ban it because we think that would be
closing the door to what could be a very exciting marketing
opportunity in future.''
An e-mail preference service would operate in a similar way
to services provided by direct marketing trade bodies for direct
customer contacts through the post, telephone and fax, by which
consumers can ask to be excluded from direct mail.
Lloyd said that junk e-mail, or ``spam,'' was reaching
epidemic proportions in the U.S. Recent research found that
while there was much less of it here, 95 percent of such
messages coming into Britain originated in the United States.
Three sites on the global computer network offered lists of
electronic mail addresses for 10 pounds for a million names, and
it could take just one hour to reach all one million addresses,
Lloyd said.
But unlike direct mail via the post for which the marketer
pays, spam pushed costs onto consumers, who paid for telephone
access to the Internet to receive such messages.
Senders of unwanted electronic mailshots for porn or
timeshares used ``all sorts of tricks'' to evade barriers thrown
up by Internet service providers, Lloyd said.
Cautioning that the technical means of creating an e-mail
preference service against spam were extremely complex, Lloyd
said, ``It's the cancer of electronic commerce. You either kill
it or cure it.''
The direct marketing community was looking to the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
summit opening in Ottawa on October 7 to adopt the proposal as
part of global guidelines to unlock electronic commerce.
Development was also hampered by a lack of global agreement
on issues like taxation and domain name registration, Lloyd
said.
British, American and Canadian direct marketers hoped to
persuade colleagues at a separate meeting in San Francisco next
week to agree a global code of practice for children on the
Internet, covering privacy issues and content.
``We need some guidelines to regulate the transmission of
commercial information to children in online environments.
That'll be a very big step.''
Direct marketers wanted to act in the interests of commerce,
parents and educators, before an anticipated boom in use of the
Internet by children in homes and schools, Lloyd said.
He expected a global code to be announced formally in San
Francisco after resolution of key issues such as the age of a
child, commonly interpreted as less than 16 in Britain and
Europe, but 13 in the U.S.
Earlier this week Britain's Direct Marketing Association
together with the Federation of Electrical Industries won one
million ecus ($1.19 million) of European Commission funding to
develop a global system to protect intellectual property with
encryption and digital watermarks, the DMA head said.
``It's more important to owners of intellectual property
rights but I'd be able to digitally direct market products all
over the globe knowing that somebody can't steal them,'' Lloyd
said.
((London Advertising Desk, +44 171 542 2815, fax +44 171 542
2929, e-mail adnewslon+reuters.com))
($1-.8407 Ecu)
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