The Register: China to form anti-spam task force
China has been a laggard in forcing blatantly-illegal spam scam schemes out of business, and it has also lagged in making hundreds of thousands of its Internet servers secure against would-be hijacking spammers. But all that could change. Now that many Western companies block all Chinese email traffic by default, and an increasing proportion of the spam seems to be targeting the Chinese themselves, the Chinese Internet Association decided to crack down on spammers.
Previous highly-public efforts by China to crack down on Internet-related problems, such as software pirating and other intellectual property abuses have resulted in little progress. One Usenet poster summed up his interpretation of China's change of course:
"The Chinese have for too long thought that its size is an advantage as no one would want to block (potentially) a quarter of the world's population. But having all those spammers in one place makes it a no-brainer."
