Enough is enough: Americans get millions of unsolicited phone calls and junk e-mails. Congress is acting to limit them. But marketers say they have a free-speech right to make their pitches.

• Author: Vilbig, Peter
• Position: National

In Washington, D.C., 18-year-old Harry Stein had his aha! moment on Internet spam--the unsolicited junk e-mail that clogs millions of in-boxes across America--when the family returned from a weeklong vacation. The Stein e-mail account was buried in over 100 e-mail messages, the vast majority of them spam.

"It took almost an hour and a half to go through it," says Stein, who is starting his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin this fall. "We were taking turns deleting it. One of us would come in and do 30, and then another would do another 50." The family quickly bought a service thai helps filter Internet spare from their e-mail accounts.

Halfway across the U.S. in St. Louis, Nikki Elwood, 16, says Internet spain is an annoyance, but even more frustrating are the calls from telemarketers bombarding her house with sales pitches. The calls come throughout the day and even into the night. "We've gotten a couple at 2 a.m.," she says. "We've gotten to where we just hang up."

50 PERCENT AND GROWING

Modern communications in the form of the phone and the Interenet have turned what were once the infrequent knocks of traveling salespeople on the doors of American homes into daily home invasions. Telemarketers make about 65 million phone calls a day, and the spam onslaught is worse: By the end of 2003, 7.1 trillion spare messages will have been sent, according to Brightmail, a spam detection company. That's up from 3.6 trillion in 2002. By last July, 50 percent of e-mail was spam.

The constant assault has put the U.S. Congress in the position of refereeing a classic battle between voters angry at the sales pitches and marketers who stand to lose billions if their entryway into American homes is slammed shut. For years marketing groups used lobbying clout to stall congressional bills aimed at their operations. But the mood in Congress shifted this year--some say because members themselves are fed up with the hard sell. Congress limited telemarketing calls in a bill President George W. Bush signed into law in June. The bill created a national do-not-call list. This fall, the House of Representatives and the Senate are expected to take up legislation aimed at spam.

INVASION OF PRIVACY OR FREE SPEECH?

"We have to deal with the problem," says U.S. Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, a sponsor of one version of the antispam legislation before Congress. "Doing nothing is not an option."

But the outcome of the battle over unsolicited marketing is far from certain. Groups representing the $100-billion-a-year telemarketing industry have already...