what kind of opt-out? (Score 5, Insightful)

Unfortunately this discussion's overly simplistic. What kind of opt-out legislation is the US considering? There's 2 main kinds I can think of. The first is to opt out with each provider. That approach seems disastrous -- spammers just change their name or address, and what a miracle, they can spam you again. The second type is to opt out through a national registry, similar to the "do-not-call" registry that's been/being implemented in several states (including Massachusetts). If enough e-mail users opt out of spam (and why wouldn't they?) it could cripple the commercial viability of spam (at least in the US).

A final point: maybe the European approach is more effective, maybe not, but I don't see why legislative uniformity is necessary.... As long as all countries are effective in decreasing the incentive/legality for spammers to exist, does it matter? Silly example -- let's say large country A fined each piece of spam at $1 million, and large country B implemented the death penalty for spamming -- I think spam would decrease a lot pretty quickly. Anyway, if several competing approaches are tried on a large scale, and one is far and away a success, others will follow suit. Please don't posit US government conspiracies to protect spammers -- all the Nasdaq-100 companies hate spam (e.g., Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple). So do 99.9% of their online constituents. Those are the parties US legislators will (at least try to) protect.