History

CAUCE had its roots in discussions among a very small group of people concerning creating an on-line petition to the US Congress to amend the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA, or the Junk Fax law) to include e-mail. A e-mail list, spam-law, was created to contain the TCPA-related discussion as details of proposed text were debated and the concept moved beyond the original petition to the creation of an actual organization. Along the way, a core group of spam-law members was identified, and when CAUCE launched in May 1997, this core group was constituted into the Provisional Board of CAUCE. In subsequent years, the term Provisional was dropped from formal usage.

CAUCE Canada was formed in June of 1998, after the Chairman of CAUCE was approached by the Chairman-to-be of CAUCE Canada about Canadians starting their own national effort. CAUCE Canada was the third group in the CAUCE family, after CAUCE and EuroCAUCE. The similarity in names led CAUCE to start to informally use CAUCE US to distinguish itself from the Canadian neighbor.

CAUBE.AU, the Australian member of the CAUCE family, launched in 1999, followed by CAUCE India, which later merged into APCAUCE (Asia-Pacific). The CAUCE organizations created an international parent group, the simply-named CAUCE International, or iCAUCE, in 2002 and vested ownership of the CAUCE name and the power to designate new national and trans-national organizations with iCAUCE.