In July 2003, the Government adopted, at the Inter-Ministerial Committee for the Information Society, a series of measures to combat spam, the implementation of which was entrusted to the DDM. A contact group bringing together the main players in the Internet, both public and private, was set up. The work of this contact group has led to a concrete solution: a national platform for automatic spam reporting.
12.Introduction
Spam (or spamming) generally refers to unsolicited e-mails.
In a report of 14 October 1999 entitled «electronic direct mail and the protection of personal data», the Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) defines spam as “the sending of unsolicited e-mails in bulk, and sometimes repeated, to persons with whom the sender has never had contact and whose e-mail address he has received irregularly”.
The proliferation of spam in recent years is a proven and worrying fact. The share of spam was estimated in a Pew Internet & American Life study in October 2003, at 50% of total email traffic. At present, the low estimates of the various institutes and companies do not fall below 80% (MessageLabs, which markets solutions for messengers, put forward the figure of 86.2% at the end of 2006). Some put forward the figure of 16 billion for the number of spam routed every day in Europe (Radicati, October 2006). According to the Ministry of Economy, the cost of unsolicited e-mails has been estimated at 39 billion euros worldwide. In Europe, it was estimated at around 3.5 billion euros in Germany, 1.9 billion euros in the United Kingdom and 1.4 billion euros in France.
Profitable for spammers, who see it as an inexpensive way to massively prospect new customers, spam has a cost for Internet users, businesses and ISPs: connection costs, storage of messages but also time spent sorting, filtering spam or managing the technical problems they create.
By raising user mistrust of e-mail and the Internet, “spam” is an obstacle to the development of the Information Society.
In this context, the Government wanted to provide appropriate responses. In July 2003, at the Inter-Ministerial Committee for the Information Society, it adopted a series of measures to combat spam, the implementation of which was entrusted to the DDM. A contact group bringing together the main players in the Internet, both public and private, was set up. The work of this contact group has led to a concrete solution: a national platform for automatic spam reporting.
In order to carry out this initiative, the association Signal Spam was formed in November 2005. The private actors members of the association are the professional organisations of the main sectors concerned by the fight against spam, as well as individual companies. The competent public authorities also participate as observer members. Alongside the Media Development Directorate, the CNIL, the Enterprise Directorate-General, the Directorate-General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and the Suppression of Fraud (DGCCRF), the Central Directorate for Judicial Police, the Ministry of Justice, the National Gendarmerie, the General Secretariat of National Defence and the Bank of France.
This public-private platform is a first in the fight against spam and provides an effective, concrete and coordinated response to the problem of spam.
As of May 10, 2007, the reporting service has been operational and is available free of charge at: www.signal-spam.fr