ECPA may harm electronic commerce • Telecom Trends

I wonder about the potential for the Electronic Commerce Protection Act to inadvertently chill some beneficial forms of electronic commerce communications.

Let’s look at the purpose of the Act:

3. The purpose of this Act is to promote the efficiency and adaptability of the Canadian economy by regulating commercial conduct that discourages the use of electronic means to carry out commercial activities, because that conduct

impairs the availability, reliability, efficiency and optimal use of electronic means to carry out commercial activities;

imposes additional costs on businesses and consumers;

compromises privacy and the security of confidential information; and

undermines the confidence of Canadians in the use of electronic means of communication to carry out their commercial activities in Canada and abroad.

So, we are trying to promote efficient, electronic means to carry out commercial activities. A wonderful and noble intent.

Just don’t try to use the electronic equivalent of bulk mail. In hard copy format, I can go to the post office or community newspaper and distribute tons of environmentally unfriendly flyers to people with whom I have no previous relationship.

Why wouldn’t we allow this to be done in the electronic world? Isn’t the use of bulk email more efficient and even more reliable?

Yet the ECPA prohibits targeted many legitimate company email campaigns:

6. (1) No person shall send or cause or permit to be sent to an electronic address a commercial electronic message unless

the person to whom the message is sent has consented to receiving it, whether the consent is express or implied; …

Isn’t this provision yet another restriction on the ability of businesses to leverage the efficiency of electronic communications?

Section 6(2) seems a more reasonable restriction:

(2) The message must be in a form that conforms to the prescribed requirements and must

set out prescribed information that identifies the person who sent the message and the person — if different — on whose behalf it is sent;

set out information enabling the person to whom the message is sent to readily contact one of the persons referred to in paragraph (a); and

set out an unsubscribe mechanism …

With these rules, and just this section 6(2), recipients can easily opt-out or set up filters to block. Subsection 2 would seem to offer no less protecting consumers, but without limiting the ability of businesses to promote their products.

It isn’t that I like getting spam; or getting junk mail. The problem is that the Act seems to be banning electronic communications that would be completely legitimate in paper form.

I’m not crazy about door-to-door sales people either, but we need to be careful about restricting communications in a democratic society. Instead, we can teach ourselves how to slam the door politely.

And once in a while, we actually open our wallets and purchase something, due to an unsolicited communication, whether it was in person, on paper or transmitted electronically.

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