The distinction between voice and data is non-existent in many cases, but it seems that new laws don’t reflect this, and are therefore inconsistent and obsolete as soon they are passed.
A federal judge throws out the national ‘do not call list’. Meanwhile, at the state level, California bans spam, and in the UK spam is made illegal altogether.
What if anti-spam laws could be formulated to prevent unwanted telemarketing calls?
“The [Californian] law also prohibits collecting e-mail addresses or registering multiple e-mail addresses for the purpose of initiating or advertising in an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement from California or to a California e-mail address.”
Aside from the fact that this begs the question, what is a California email address? What if there were a law that covered not just email but any unsolicited electronic communication?
Surely this would be more logical since ’email’ is merely a particular technical implementation of electronic messaging, which could change in the future.
Even if the law did not cover future technical enhancements to email, by covering the notion of email and not the implementation, in the past, the term electronic mail, which was contracted to email, used to include group IV faxes, i.e. digital communication to a telephone number.
If the law covered the term email, either to refer to its original meaning or potential use, and you used VOIP telephony, any self-consistent anti-spam law would necessarily stop unsolicited marketing altogether?
This will inevitably become an issue in the future. Anti-spam legislation has become necessary because sending email is essentially free, business use of IP based telephony and pre-recorded messages could make phone-call-spam free.