This proposal by AOL and Yahoo! to charge postage for bulk email doesn’t strike me as a terribly good idea. It’s pitched as an anti-spam tactic, but that doesn’t seem right. Spam will still be spam. It will continue to be filtered out as best as AOL is able using traditional spam filters. Some spam will continue to get through, just as it does now.
What AOL and Yahoo are doing is attempting to take a cut every time a legitimate business wants to communicate with its customers. For example, I’ve given Apple permission to send me occasional emails: I like their products and don’t mind an occasional sales pitch. I know that if I get tired of those emails, I can banish them with an “unsubscribe” request. Apple values its relationship with me and wouldn’t risk my anger by sending emails after I’d asked them to stop.
I don’t see how I benefit in the slightest if my ISP begins charging Apple for the privilege of sending me those emails. To the contrary, by discouraging some companies from offering bulk-email subscription services, I would actually be made worse off if the policy is enforced aggressively. Smaller companies, non-profits, and others on tight budgets might decide that they simply won’t deliver their emails to Yahoo and AOL email addresses.
Whatever benefits this plan might have for consumers (so far, I’m not seeing any), fighting spam is not one of them. While I fully support their right to charge for the valuable service they provide, it seems misleading to pretend this plan is somehow for the benefit of their users, rather than simply a way for them to generate more revenue.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.