Senator tackles spam and RFID
Published: 03 Sep 2003 15:10 BST
The Redondo Beach state senator thinks Microsoft has a bad attitude when it comes to spam.
As a California legislator for the past 10 years, Bowen has drafted and introduced bills intended to tie spammers' hands and better protect consumers' privacy. But more recently, she has criticised Microsoft for lobbying against certain spam bills, including one she championed.
Bowen has gone so far as to say "trusting Microsoft to protect computer users from spam is like putting telemarketers in charge of the do-not-call list."
The head of a Senate subcommittee on new technologies, Bowen is no technophobe. She's among the many pet owners that have had their cats and dogs implanted with RFID (radio frequency identification) chips in order to find them if they're picked up by the pound. She's also a fan of science fiction writers William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, whose books have won popularity among the geek-chic crowd and have inspired some of Bowen's policy stances.
Q: You've harshly criticised Microsoft for lobbying against certain spam bills, including yours. Do you think your rhetoric is appropriate?
A: I do. I believe it's an accurate assessment of how Microsoft has acted on the issue of spam, which is basically to talk out of both sides of its mouth. If you read The Wall Street Journal, you'll find Bill Gates advocating a system of self-regulation in which Microsoft becomes, effectively, the post office for spam and collects the equivalent of a postage stamp for each piece of spam delivered.
Of course, that would also give them the ability to charge their Internet or software customers for the ability to block spam. So Microsoft has talked openly about wanting to license spammers or wanting to create a postage-stamp concept.
What's wrong with that?
I believe we are making this far too complicated. If Microsoft was against spam, it would have supported a bill like Senate Bill 12 that requires permission before unsolicited commercial email gets delivered into someone's mailbox. Instead, they danced around with all this stuff about how only scammers are spammers and how, if they've been paid the postage stamp, that it's somehow no longer spam.
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