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| _ ous AM 5/30/2001, Internet Policy News Page 5 of 9 Pees A representative from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), one of several U.S. government organizations belabored with the task of cracking down on spammers, said Thursday that it has limited resources in aiding consumers in the fight against bulk e-mail. "We're not an agency that can set the laws," said Jennifer Mandigo, staff attorney with the FTC's consumer division. "But the FTC is ready to generally enforce whatever (Congress) passes." Ted Gavin, a consultant with Nachman Hays Consulting who is helping to draft policy against spam for the marketing industry, said that the issue will be better fought by reaching the people using direct e-mail marketing as an advertising venue. Many companies selling products or services would have better luck targeting a specific audience rather than blanketing mailing lists with spam, Gavin said. Many marketing professionals fall victim to the fallacy that distributing mass e-mail is low cost. "The 'Net is not a free resource," Gavin said. "Somebody pays for everything that gets done on the Internet. There is always a cost associated with sending an e-mail.” The cost is hard to calculate, Gavin said, but includes the resources ISPs use to deal with large amounts of data being sent over their networks, The cost is also borne by consumers who have to pay for the time it takes to download spam through their ISP. In fact, the European Commission said in a report earlier this year that spam costs European Internet users about 10 billion euros ($8.57 billion) every year in money spent on Internet connectivity. Since the early 1990s, when America Online first took its service to consumers, the Internet has become a gold mine for direct marketers, according to Geller. (AOL Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.com.) Since then, marketing scams such as Ponzi and pyramid schemes have migrated from mail and newspaper advertisements to the less costly medium. And there may be no way to get rid of spam if governments, marketers and consumers don't come to @ consensus on a solution. "T remember e-mail before there was ever marketing, when it was just a bunch of techies chatting online,” Geller said. b6 -5 b7C -5 FBI(19-cv-1495)-2156