Media Alliance

AOL Charging for Email

By the Electronic Frontier Foundation
[See below for Open Letter to AOL]

AOL's Sender Pays Email

In February 2006, AOL announced that it would be taking payment for incoming emails, in return for skipping its usual anti-spam filters. The payment system would use Goodmail's CertifiedEmail product, which enables AOL and Goodmail to charge a per-email fee, estimated to be around a quarter of a cent per mail received.

EFF believes that the free passage of email is a vital element of free speech online. When ISPs demand a cut of "Pay-to-play" email, it turns them into email mobsters: interfering with the free passage of communications by demanding protection money at the gates of their customer's computers.

AN OPEN LETTER TO AMERICA ONLINE

We wish to express our serious concern with AOL's adoption of Goodmail's CertifiedEmail, which is a threat to the free Internet.

This system would create a two-tiered Internet in which affluent mass emailers could pay AOL a fee for every email sent in return for a "guarantee" that such messages would bypass spam filters and go directly to AOL members' inboxes. Those who did not pay would inevitably be left behind. Your customers expect that your first obligation is to deliver all their wanted mail, and this plan is a step away from that obligation.

As Internet advocacy groups, non-profit charities, e-mail experts, and businesses, we ask you to reconsider your decision and keep the Internet free. Your customers' mailboxes should belong first to your customers, not to you, and access to them should not be yours to sell.

Taking money from senders won't help the fight against spam - in fact, this plan assumes that spam will continue and that giant corporations will be willing to pay to have their emails bypass spam filters. Non-paying spammers will not reduce the amount of mail they throw at your filters simply because others pay to evade them.

Perversely, this new two-tiered system would actually reward AOL financially for failing to maintain its email service. The chief advantage of paying to send CertifiedEmail is that it can bypass AOL's spam filters. Non-paying customers are being asked to trust that after paid-mail goes into effect, AOL will properly maintain its spam filters so only unwanted mail gets thrown away. But the economic incentives point the other way: the more legitimate mail that AOL's filters discard, the better a deal paid-mail would appear to potential clients, and the more money AOL would make.

The bottom-line is that this proposed pay-to-send service actually encourages AOL to degrade free email for regular customers. This would disrupt the communications of millions who cannot afford to pay your fees - including the innumerable non-profits, civic organizations, charities, small businesses, and small community mailing lists that make email so vital to your members.

And what if other Internet service providers retaliate and start demanding their own ransoms to accept mail from your millions of users? Your company works hard to simplify the Internet. Don't start a surcharge war that will complicate it with tiered services and dozens of middleman fees for every simple act of communication.

The seamless distribution of free email is a vital component in maintaining free speech online. Over-vigorous spam filtering and the slow encroachment of discriminatory pricing threaten that freedom.

We have always been happy working together with you to improve the rules by which you fight spam. We have a common enemy in unwanted spammers. But a pay-to-send "certified" system does not help to fight spam, it only serves to make the Internet less free for everyone. We stand together in asking you to reconsider your decision to use Goodmail.

Posted by jeff at February 24, 2006 09:33 AM | TrackBack