On the local (Australian) front (pardon the anchor cliché), the recent tabling of a tough national Spam law has received industry accolade, and looks set to pass when it is read for a second time next month.

Under the proposed legislation, entities engaging in electronic mass-mail practices face penalties of over $1 million a day. The penalties may be clear (and rather hefty, especially when compared to other, more serious, corporate practices), but far more hazy are details surrounding jurisdiction. Presumably, only Australian, for-profit organisations will be subject to the new law, which will render it pretty much useless.

Allow me to explain. Bandwidth in Australia is ludicrously expensive, thanks in no small measure to the other actions of Richard Alston in his capacity as Minister for Communications, IT, and the Arts. As a result, small or home-based businesses are forced to out-source their web hosting to the United States or Japan, where wholesale prices are far cheaper. What this means is that a vast majority of spammers are either going to be sending mail from the US or from former Soviet-bloc countries, where bandwidth is fast, cheap, and the relatively unregulated.

Those few businesses which do spam from within Australia are likely to be large enough to be able to afford a menacing legal team with which to artfully dodge any penalty (for example, by claiming the user is at fault or embedding indemnifying disclaimers into the e-mails themselves; even if these defences fail, they could always claim a rogue representative of the company sent the mail, or a satisfied customer, since it would be difficult to obtain the IP address from which the mail was sent). For these reasons the legislation is unlikely to be effective. We need a worldwide collaboration on unsolicited electronic mail if we're going to get anywhere.