In (rec.radio.amateur.homebrew), "Watson A.Name - \"Watt Sun, the Dark Remover\"" wrote:

For five years, Calif had laws that were on the books but were
unenforced. They were challengd as unconstitutional. They and 35 other
state laws weren't consistent, making it a mess for the courts and
lawyers in every state. We had 36 different tools but they were largely
unused. Now there is a consistent set of national laws with much better
chance of being enforced. Someone has to light a fire under the feds to
get them to step up the enforcement. All this bitching, whining and
nmoaning about what used to be and how bad it is now is a huge waste of
time. Get over it and proceed on with the tools given to us, and hammer
the spammers.

Horse exhaust.

You-Can-Spam, under the guise of improving the situation by applying
one uniform law everywhere, forced everything into one badly-fitting,
Procrustean bed, overriding and effectively nullifying existing state
laws, some of which (Washington, California) were *very* much better
written and more effective.

Yes, those laws got challenged as unconstitutional. A challenge by
itself means nothing; it's the *OUTCOME* of the challenge that means
something, and the Washington and California laws survived all the
challenges against them. It's because they survived those challenges,
thereby putting fear into the cryostats[1] of the folks who run the
advertising industry and of the Senators from Coca-Cola, Time-Warner,
and the other big owners of federal legislators, that You-Can-Spam
came to be.

Private right of action used to exist because of state laws, but that
right now has been removed by You-Can-Spam, and only providers and
Attorneys General have standing to sue.

You-Can-Spam is tailor-made for the advertising industry, which comes
as no surprise to me, because the folks who really wrote it certainly
appear to have been advertising industry lobbyists.

If you don't like all the bitching, whining, and moaning about what
used to be, then you have the right to move somewhere that prohibits
it. Choose carefully: places that prohibit it may not let you move out
again. Me, I'll stay here and bitch, whine, moan, and lean hard on my
congresscritters.

[1] We can be quite certain that they don't have hearts. A heart is
not capable of pumping liquid Helium.

Followups to news.admin.net-abuse.email, where this subthread belongs.

--
Mike Andrews, W5EGO

Tired old sysadmin