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UltraDNS Calls for Tighter Spam Control UltraDNS rids its own network of known offenders and pledges funds for consortium to define and regulate spam SAN MATEO, Calif., April 30, 2002 -- UltraDNS™ Corporation, the leading Directory Infrastructure Services Provider (DISP) that guarantees mission-critical directory reliability and performance, today announced it will be pledging seed money to establish a broad-base industry consortium of companies and service providers to pursue regulation and enforcement of spam policy at the national level. UltraDNS has implemented operational procedures to prevent senders of unsolicited bulk email from benefiting from its global network and technology. According to Gartner Group, spam increased at least fivefold in 2001 ("Antispam Ruling Will Benefit E-mail Advertisers and Recipients," January 8, 2002). Twenty states have taken action against spam abuse, including a recent decision made by a California court that requires e-mail advertisers to identify their messages and provide ways for users to "opt out" or be removed from advertisers' e-mail lists. Laws curbing spam remain stalled because marketers and anti-spam advocates are having difficulty driving consensus on a legal definition of spam. Further, online civil libertarians have argued that complete bans on spam would infringe on the freedom of speech and imperil legitimate email marketing tools. Like spam, unsolicited sales calls and junk mail cause companies and individuals to waste time and energy resulting in reduced productivity. Rampant email misuse damages the credibility of responsible marketers that utilize targeted, direct email campaigns to communicate with consumers. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has established guidelines for telemarketers and direct mail companies that monitor and curtail consumer abuse. For example, the commission prohibits and outlines certain activities, such as appropriate times for sales calls and banning telemarketing companies from blocking their telephone numbers from caller ID devices. Spam, however, has no governing guidelines. "Without federal regulation, there are no universal guidelines to define spam, and as a result, anti-spam organizations are forced to rely on crude nondiscriminate measures, such as blacklisting or even blocking all mail originating from a specific domain - ultimately serving as the judge and the jury for both spam violators as well as the Service Providers that enable them," Ben Petro, president and CEO, UltraDNS Corporation. "In doing so, they hamper legitimate business correspondence and adversely impact service providers with a shotgun approach to regulation." "As the industry continues to define spam and identify culpability, we are trying to do our part on behalf of businesses and consumers to help stop the proliferation of email abuse," Petro added. "Regulation needs to be put in place not only to protect the public from spam violators but to also outline actionable recourse should an offense take place." DNS forms the first link in the chain of events that connect an Internet user to a web site. By translating the name typed into a browser (www.example.com) to an IP address (172.16.93.87), DNS touches every Internet transaction. As such, DNS is at the core of every application including email. "Since DNS is the first touch point for any Internet transaction, we are trying to control spam by disabling spam violators from the foundation, and we hope that our actions will set an example and a call to action for the industry," Rodney Joffe, chairman and CTO, UltraDNS Corporation. "UltraDNS is committed to helping establish universal policy for spam so we are taking aggressive steps to help the industry set guidelines and preserve email as a tool for legitimate commercial email campaigns."
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