Madam Speaker, one of the things that the bill actually identifies is that if there is a prior business relationship there is no requirement to get that kind of prior consent. So that is an element that is a very common sense approach.
Where it becomes difficult is where people who do not want to receive it say, “I bought a hard drive from this company three years ago and they're still emailing me three and four years after. That is spam”. Then it becomes a question, are we starting to go after businesses that legitimately have a customer base? They email customers and that is how we get around it. If people then start to make complaints against them, saying they are spammers and want to be protected because prior consent was not given, nowhere did it say they were going to get emails. That is the problem.
We do not have a bill where we are tying up legitimate businesses who get big server lists. Every politician here has a big server list they email. Many people who get their email may think it is spam. If they do not like it, erase it, but it is still a legitimate process. The issue becomes what if we get a cumbersome law where businesses are going to get tied up as potential spammers. We need to isolate the kind of nefarious activity, namely spam, that is clearly useless, stupid, idiotic, and fraudulent. It is clogging up our networks and sometimes causing much more damage, and we have to be able to go after the spammers.