During the press conference organised today for announcing the 2009 Action Plan of the National Authority for Communications, Liviu Nistoran, the ANC President, declared that one of the Authority’s priorities this year is fighting against unsolicited commercial communications and spam messages.
On this occasion, the ANC President announced that, following the completion of investigations carried out since the beginning of the year, the Authority applied contravention fines to 8 legal persons and, respectively, 4 natural persons for the breach of the electronic commerce law. ANC is also conducting other investigations regarding the breach of the provisions of Law no.365/2002 on electronic commerce, republished.
Thus, six companies were fined for failing to send the information requested by ANC pursuant to Law no.365/2002: S.C. Prestige Car Imports S.R.L. (RON 10,000), S.C. Altfel S.R.L. (RON 5,000), S.C. ALL Educational S.A (RON 5,000), S.C. Finit Consult & Management S.R.L. (RON 5,000), S.C. Neoti Impex Com Prod S.R.L. (RON 5,000) and S.C. Evolva Telecom S.R.L. (RON 5,000). Four natural persons were also fined with RON 5,000 each for similar failures to comply with ANC’s requests under the same law.
S.C. Schuller Eh Klar S.R.L. and S.C. Karpaten Turism S.R.L. were fined with RON 1,000, respectively RON 5,000 for having sent unsolicited commercial communications.
By the end of this week, ANC will finalise six other investigations on the breach of the electronic commerce law.
“Last year we received more than 1,000 complaints regarding unsolicited commercial communications and the investigations spanned over such long periods because of the lack of cooperation of the parties involved. We decided therefore to apply high fines to those that repeatedly refuse to provide the information the Authority needs to complete its investigations,” stated Liviu Nistoran, the ANC President.
The investigation of the complaints on the sending of unsolicited commercial communications undergoes a procedure that requires the cooperation of several factors: the plaintiff, on the one hand, who must provide the Authority with all the pieces of evidence it requires, and the providers of Internet access services, on the other hand, which are requested to provide data on the identity of the owners of certain IPs. In a final stage of the investigation, the respondent is required to prove the existence of the addressee’s agreement to receive commercial communications. Should such agreement be missing, then the respondent may be sanctioned with contravention fines amounting from RON 1,000 to RON 50,000.
The 2009 Action Plan also includes an information campaign to be carried out in view of diminishing the incidence of commercial communications and spam messages, by both discouraging those who spam and by educating the e-mail users, who can better protect themselves if they hold sufficient information. Within this purpose, ANC established a working group comprising representatives of the providers of Internet access services, providers of security solutions, providers of Information Society services and representatives of civil society organizations.
In 2008, ANC received more than 1,000 complaints related to non-requested commercial communications and applied 17 fines.