Direct mail double cross?

A fight over opt-in marketing has anti-spam activists crying foul.

By Deborah Scoblionkov

Nov 12, 1999 | In December, nine prominent Internet activists from the United States and Canada arrived in Washington for a secret meeting with officials from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). The activists' message: Stop spamming, please.

For five hours straight, the activists -- founding members of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (CAUCE) and representatives from various Internet service providers, telecommunications companies and software developers, including Microsoft -- tried to impress upon the DMA's honchos why they should shun unsolicited junk e-mail. They tried to educate the marketers about the economic and ethical issues of "cost-shifted advertising" (whereby the recipient pays), and about the threat that unbridled spam poses to consumers' privacy, to companies' private property rights and to the cooperative culture of the Internet. And they hoped that an agreement could be reached that would reduce spam without government intervention.

The Spam Summit, bringing together as it did some vocal adversaries, was often contentious, but a joint press release composed at the meeting's end showed evidence of consensus. Both groups agreed to a set of recommendations, including support for legislation prohibiting false identification in commercial e-mail; both also acknowledged that "opt-in" (whereby commercial e-mail is sent only to people who have opted to receive it) is the most successful way for online marketers to target consumers, and agreed to create a nonprofit global "opt-out" list, which would allow individuals and companies to register that they did not want to receive unsolicited e-mail.

But it seems the truce was short-lived. In recent days, the DMA has praised the potential of spam and lauded the success of the Net's self-regulation. The activists, meanwhile, admit that this may be the moment to give in to something they never wanted -- government regulation. No one is eager to invite Uncle Sam to oversee the Net, but anti-spammers -- angered by what they consider to be an about-face by the DMA -- concede they don't know how else to stem the flow of unsolicited e-mail.

"We tried repeatedly to show them how they could have their cake and eat it too -- that opt-in marketing is a win-win situation for the DMA and consumers," says Nick Nicholas, the executive director of the Mail Abuse Prevention System, which operates the Real-time Blackhole List (RBL) -- a blacklist of Internet addresses known to send spam. "But," he posted to an anti-spam newsgroup, "the DMA has shown that they are untrustworthy and completely lacking in integrity."

Of course, no one ever expected that a direct-marketing organization would agree to anything like a ban on spam, or would denounce an advertising opportunity. But the activists had high hopes that they could convince the marketers to limit commercial e-mail, targeting only those who request it.

The DMA, however, sounds quite excited about the possibilities opened up by the Internet. DMA president and CEO Robert Wientzen touted the use of unsolicited commercial e-mail as a "powerful marketing tool" at the association's 82nd annual conference last month in Toronto. And in congressional testimony last week, DMA Senior Vice President for Government Affairs Jerry Cerasale lauded the success of the marketing industry's efforts at self-regulation. Last week, the DMA also announced the launch of a global remove list -- but one that does not allow ISPs to opt out their own domains.

"I'm not terribly surprised about their about-face, but I'm most appalled by their dishonesty," says Nicholas. "My breath is taken away by how blatantly they turned around and have done and said completely different things."

Other participants in last year's meeting echoed his sentiments. "I am really dismayed that they seem to have done a complete about-face from the assurances they gave us at the Spam Summit a year ago," said John Levine, author of the bestselling "Internet for Dummies" book. "When we met, one of the things we agreed was that opt-in was by far the best way to do advertising. But now, both in Wientzen's remarks at the convention and [Cerasale's] testimony on the Hill, they've said they want to do opt-out advertising."

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