Facebook activists and people's deputies have submitted a bill on combating spam. Fines worth millions will be imposed on spammers and operators. MPs Kostiantyn Usov, Leonid Yemets and Boryslav Bereza have registered in the Verkhovna Rada bill No. 8186 on amending certain legislative acts of Ukraine on counteracting spam. Kostiantyn Usov said the bill was written jointly with the team of authors and is "the first bill from Facebook."

The bill introduces the definition of spam as the mass sending of advertising messages, to which subscribers did not give consent. Businesses and individuals are prohibited from sending spam, while telecoms operators from accepting orders for spamming if the customer cannot prove that subscribers agreed to receive messages. Spammers and mobile operators for the deliberate distribution of spam will be imposed fines from 500 to 1,000 subsistence minimums (from UAH 850,000 to UAH 1.7 million) or sentenced to imprisonment of up to three years.

"Mobile operators are not interested in defeating spam - they earn a lot of money every month. Our authors (Andriy Tkachenko, Anton Khodza, Ihor Schedrin, Nikol Borman and me) proposed a legislative solution: the customers of spamming and operators will need to confirm that the subscribers agreed to receive SMS. The fines fixed in our bill (up to UAH 1.7 million) are significant enough so that mobile operators for the first time be concerned with the suppression of spamming," Taras Kotov, one of the authors of the bill, said.

"The public discussion of the document lasted four months, while the operators kept silent. Now the bill will be discussed by the Verkhovna Rada Committee for Informatization and Communication. We hope it will be put to vote as soon as possible. To defeat spam is the people's will," he said.

Persons who send out messages will have to inform consumers about subscription to such SMS within three months after the entry into force of this law. Such a notification should contain a mechanism for refusing spamming via a hyperlink and/or a backward message to the sender with the word "Stop."

Uklon, the Ukrainian online taxi service, stated the company had advised the authors of the bill.

"Uklon joined the creation of a bill on SMS spam! The draft law, which will bring an end to the work of spammers, who annoy all of us with intrusive SMS advertising, has been submitted to the Verkhovna Rada. We consulted the working group of the authors of the bill and are very pleased that the fight against spam has reached a new level and can finally become a success," Uklon said.

"From the very beginning of work in Ukraine, we have been constantly struggling with the desire of partners to use our clients' numbers for spamming. We persuaded them, took actions, imposed sanctions, and broke contracts - everything was in vain. So we came to the conclusion that the core of the problem is in operators who accept orders for spamming texts without verification whether users themselves ordered these texts. The authors of the bill stipulated the principle of operators' responsibility for spamming in the document. Therefore for the first time there is a chance that it will really work," it said.