June 15, 2004
Blog Entry

FTC Says No to DNE Registry (for now)

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A national Do Not Email registry that doesn't authenticate email senders would not only fail to stop unsolicited commercial email but could even trigger more spam to consumers, the Federal Trade Commission said today in a mandated report to Congress.

"Without effective authentication of email," the report said, "any registry is doomed to fail. With authentication, better CAN-SPAM Act enforcement and better filtering by ISPs may even make a registry unnecessary."

Spammers, the FTC said, "would most likely use a registry as a mechanism for verifying the validity of email addresses and, without authentication, the commission would be largely powerless to identify those responsible for misusing the registry," the commission warned.

The worst-case scenario comes with children's email addresses. Although legitimate marketers could use the registry to keep from sending inappropriate mail to children, pedophiles, which the commission called "the Internet's most dangerous users," could use the same information to target children.

Instead, the FTC called for creating "widespread adoption" of email authentication standards that both government and ISPs could use to ID spammers.

The FTC would first allow private industry to come up with authentication standards, but if that didn't happen, it said, the government could step in.

View the FTC's report (in PDF) here.

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