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About the Competitive Enterprise Institute

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a nonpartisan policy analysis organization, dedicated to the principles of limited constitutional government and free enterprise. The Institute is a nonprofit educational foundation, concerned with the welfare of consumers and the economy as a whole, as opposed to one particular company or industry sector. Braden Cox is a lawyer with CEI. His specialty is e-commerce and Internet regulation. Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr. is CEI’s Vice President for Policy, and has written on Internet governance issues, specifically legislative approaches toward regulating spam. He is coeditor of Who Rules the Net? Internet Governance and Jurisdiction (Cato Institute 2003).

Email Authentication – Market Solutions Instead of Government Mandates

Dealing with spam involves more than the annoying ritual of deleting unwanted emails. It imposes real costs in terms of time and money. Stopping spam requires both costly countermeasures by Internet service providers (ISPs) and the installation of filters that sometimes block wanted emails. Challenge-and-response systems work, but they don’t stop the phenomenon of emails ricocheting throughout the Internet, and create a few problems of their own. CEI supports efforts to detect spam and holding the senders of fraudulent email accountable. However, CEI believes that heavy government involvement in the process of authentication and accreditation would harm the interests of those desiring to prevent spam. Private mechanisms are most appropriate for private networks, where problems go well beyond spam to cybersecurity itself. Private authentication mechanisms also have a role to play in protecting intellectual property—a fact that may not be taken into account, or poorly addressed, in government certification of email.