The idea of establishing a bounty for spammers’ scalps came up during the Spam Summit 2000 conference, held recently in Washington, D.C. Could this mean the rise of a new kind of info-professional, the Spam Hunter? The problem with current anti-spam laws, participants at the Spam Summit said, is that unless the unsolicited message onslaught is particularly troublesome, Internet service providers (ISPs) have little incentive to pursue the spammers in court.  A bounty would make the idea of pursuing spammers in court more appealing, and bounties could even be distributed to individual Netizens.  The bounty idea marked ?the beginning of more proactive initiatives? on the spam front, said Ed Taliaferro, vice president of international auditing and information security at RCN Telecom Services. ?People will start to realize that the reactive mode is more costly,? he said. ?There’s a lot of consensus between industry associations, activists and what ordinary people &√Ǭ£45;- constituents ? want,? said online privacy consultant Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters. ?The Direct Marketing Association wants to remove fraudulent spam and spam that misrepresents its origin. There’s a strong alignment of interests here.?Meanwhile the Unsolicited Electronic Mail Act of 2000 came in for a good deal of discussion at the Summit.  

The bill, introduced last year, has been passed by the House Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection in March. It now awaits consideration by the Commerce Committee before the full House of Representatives weighs in.  Its central provisions are: * To require unsolicited commercial e-mail messages to be labeled. * To prohibit the use of an ISP’s facilities to send unsolicited commercial e-mail if the provider’s policy forbids such uses. * To give ISPs the right to sue spammers that violate their policies.Sources say a companion bill will be introduced in the Senate during the next several weeks, and if the Spam Summit gets its way, who knows? A new generation of bounty hunting anti-spammers may be heading the way of the nearest direct marketing company before you can say ?mailshot?.