Antispam Standard Stumbles on Patent Issues

A committee working on a standard for authenticating senders of e-mail, an effort that could reduce unsolicited e-mail, commonly called “spam,” has disbanded largely because it was unable to resolve problems posed by Microsoft intellectual property licensing policies. The dispute illustrates the tension between Microsoft’s desire to protect its intellectual property and the need for wide adoption of Internet standards. As a result of the committee failure, only weaker technical measures against spam remain, and Microsoft may eventually need to relax its intellectual property licensing requirements in order to create critical mass for antispam technology.

Fighting Spam

The Internet’s most used service, e-mail, has also proven to be the least expensive way to put a commercial message in front of millions of people. Conservative estimates say that more than 50% of all e-mail messages are spam, and AOL alone blocks more than 2 billion such messages each day. (For a graph showing the growth of spam, see the illustration “Spam Growth Since 2002“.)