My first advice Mark is to read the bill and the notes rather than the press reports.
This much is obvious. I had a inkling that the reporter must have mixed up that minor detail. However I have not yet had opportunity to read over the bill myself - must try to rectify that. That said I think its a timely moment to bring this issue up for the attention of NO's again.
For instance the bill covers all email sent to a NZ email address not just email sent within NZ (which is basically the opposite of what the Herald article says) See Section 4(2) (page 27-28 of the pdf).
Which to my mind raises the question of enforcability? I have to assume that they're wanting to get a level of sign-on from overseas enforcement agencies and governments? (Its not a silly way to go, but it'll mean relatively slow visible benefit as far as joe user is concerned...)
Now did I get the wrong end of the stick here, or is this saying that the onus of the ISP that provides connectivity to the Spam Receiver to act on complaints - or the DIA will be hounding them?
Shouldn't the source ISP, and not the destination, be the people responsible for dealing with their own spam sources?
Actually Section 23(a)(i) says they should "Make a complaint to the relevant service provider".
I'm still trying to work out exactly what a "service provider" is and "relevant" could be the sender's rather than the receivers. I have a horrible feeling that it might be the layer-1 provider.
Does that translate to 'Telecom' for most of NZ? Oh dear... But in seriousness even if it is clarified as being 'the other provider' theres other holes that need to be covered - such as whether relaying alone is considered culpability, and whether ISPs are going to get barrages of 'look, its illegal, so stop it now!' and wind up with a big support-overhead in terms of training even more obstinate customers how to read and interpret mail headers..
However wonder if this has come to the attention of anyone else yet...
This bill is already being looked at by people and I would definitely encourage those who might be interested to read it and make submissions when it goes to select committee.
I wonder if anyone on-list is already in the process of preparing a submission? I would happily defer to the expert opinion of someone more qualified than myself, and instead offer my support.. (Maybe we need it as something similar as a petition in order to put up a united voice?) Mark.