April 4th, 2007
Overwhelming majority of ZDNet voters say FTC should act against Expedia.com
I just checked the online poll that we're running to see whether or not ZDNet's readers think the Federal Trade Comission (FTC) should take action against Expedia for cleverly dodging the Federal Can Spam Act. When I last checked, 87 percent of the more than 850 people who voted so far said yes. As you can see from my write-up of the situation (the poll appears at the end and you can still vote) Expedia is deceptively extending the life of real travel transactions by attaching limited coupons to them (without the customers' knowledge) and then using those coupons as a legitimate reason to promote special vacation packages to its customers via e-mail. Expedia refers to those e-mails (ones that customers cannot opt-out of) as "transactional" — a class of e-mail that's exempt from the Can Spam Act. But in reality, they're nothin of the sort. Want to be heard on this issue? Vote. Or better yet, contact the FTC.
