AOL's email tax row goes intergalactic

Found on The Register on Tuesday, 21 March 2006
Browse Internet

It's former "Net Queen", space cadet, and Register reader favorite Esther Dyson, whose latest transmission has been captured, decoded and published by the New York Times.

Well, as she explained in the Times on Friday, it unleashes the goodness of market forces. And the doubleplus emergent goodness of Darwinian evolution!

Instead, AOL and Yahoo! are endorsing a scheme which guarantees to deliver email to their subscribers only if the senders have paid an intermediary of their choice. Which happens to be GoodMail Systems.

Email sent from the rest of the world, which GoodMail considers "uncertified", must therefore risk running through AOL and Yahoo!'s discrimination process. And as this potential profit center for the two net giants takes off, there's no incentive for either company to deliver the "free email" - and every incentive for them to get the world conditioned to paying for guaranteed delivery.

It's as if the police began charging crime victims for the guarantee that they would log and investigate an incident. Do you think the crime figures would begin to rise or fall with the introduction of such an "innovation"?

When you earn on a dollar a day, paying a cent for send is not a trivial amount. (Let's put it this way, when Esther herself earned $10,000 a day for providing vacuities to ignorant dotcom companies, that would have worked out as $100 an email.)

"In my case," she says, "I'd have a list. I'd charge nothing for people I know, 50 cents for anyone new … and $3 for random advertisers. Ex-boyfriends pay $10."

I prefer getting spam instead of having a ISP who forces senders to pay up. Although the idea of getting money for receiving spam is interesting, it wouldn't change much. What's the point of having a spam folder if you need to check it because it might contain false positives? Besides, you can use whitelisting already; it will put email from accepted senders into your inbox, the rest into your spam folder. But that's something every user has to do, instead of letting senders pay the ISP.