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You're_a_Loser.com
Behind (and beneath) every Internet gazillionaire is an army of downtrodden "NetSlaves."
By Janelle Brown
[11/11/99]

The consumer's always wrong
Why else would visitors to consumer rating sites like Deja.com rank Rolling Rock the second-best beer and Alan Keyes the top presidential candidate?
By Mark Gimein
[11/10/99]

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The Internet illusion
The Web pretends to broaden our worldview, but really, says "The Control Revolution," we use it to segregate ourselves.
By Thomas Scoville
[11/09/99]

Technology: View from the top
GM's e-mobile magnate
Mark Hogan is in the "Web on wheels" driver's seat, trying to put GM on a collision course with Gen X.
By Janelle Brown
[11/08/99]

Do the paranoid survive?
Judge Jackson's opus on the browser wars portrays a Microsoft terrified by middleware.
By Mark Gimein
[11/06/99]

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Faley was quick to dismiss any notion of an agreement about opt-in marketing. "As a legal principle, we maintain the right of commercial free speech," Faley explained. "If you're a small business trying to get off the ground, the only way to do that is to reach out and let people know what products you have, to offer it to the world on the Internet. That's why we say that a marketer should be able to let consumers know what they have to offer them; and then if a consumer says 'I don't want to hear from you again,' a marketer should respect that. It's the 'one bite at the apple' approach."

Still, it sounds as if the DMA is aware of making some commitments at the summit. When asked about the DMA's support for anti-spam legislation, Faley produced DMA testimony from a June 1998 congressional hearing (six months before the Spam Summit), endorsing legislation to combat electronic fraud.

Faley was particularly proud of the DMA's compliance with the agreement to create a global opt-out list. The e-mail preference service (or e-mps), which has been in the planning stage for more than a year, will maintain a list of e-mail addresses whose owners have registered a preference to not receive unsolicited commercial e-mail. Marketers can then compare their mailing lists with the e-mps database and cleanse their list of those who have requested to be removed.

The service will be launched on Jan. 10, 2000, and all DMA members will be required to use it. The DMA's nearly 4,600 members will have access to the list at no charge, but non-members will have to pay $100 annually for unlimited use. If a good chunk of the more than 22 million small businesses in the United States decide to use the list, it could become a great source of revenue for the DMA. If, however, small businesses balk at paying a fee to find out who not to advertise to, the list will hardly fulfill its mission of giving consumers the option to be left off mass mailings.

While arguments could be made that the DMA has turned a consumer rights issue into a proprietary service, what really has activists seeing red is how the DMA has configured the opt-out list: It will not allow ISPs to opt out for their own domains. Faley cited concerns that allowing ISPs to opt out would restrict the rights of individual consumers -- those consumers who would choose to receive commercial e-mail.

"The truth is that ISPs have the ability right now to stop bulk e-mail," Faley added. "They have technological systems that can detect mass influxes of e-mail from one location and can stop them. ISPs don't need an e-mail preference service."

But some ISPs beg to differ. "That's patently wrong," said Afterburner, the abuse manager for large regional ISP Erols/RCN. "But even if it were possible, why should the burden of blocking unwanted e-mail fall upon the recipients?"

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