The notion of a potential "e-mail tax" has haunted the online world since the days when people would ask you if you'd get charged by the phone company every time your 2400 baud modem started shrieking those sweet, sweet connection noises at the top of its digital lungs. Is some shadowy government agency or corporation finally buying up the internet and turning our (ideally) freely communicative world into a "pay-to-play" environment? Not exactly, but AOL has something up its sleeve in their little corner of the internet that could have a serious impact on free communication in the long run.
The EFF reports on the DearAOL Coalition:
San Francisco - Despite AOL's attempt to divide its critics, the DearAOL.com Coalition announced Monday it has grown tenfold from 50 organizations to more than 500 as it fights AOL's controversial plan to create a two-tiered Internet that leaves the little guy behind.
Last week, AOL's proposed "email tax" came under fire from a coalition of political groups on the left and right, businesses and non-profits, charities, and Internet advocacy organizations. More than 400 publications around the world published articles about AOL's plan to allow large mass-emailers to pay to bypass AOL's spam filters and get guaranteed delivery directly into the inboxes of AOL customers—leaving the little guy behind with increasingly unreliable second-tier Internet service.
So what we've got here is AOL trying to implement a system where, rather than filtering out spam, they're allowing it through from people who can afford to pay them. Outside of the problem that deal with the devil(or, depending on how you feel about AOL, the deal between two devils) would cause for AOL users, there's the potential problem of non-payers no longer being able to count on their e-mail reaching people at AOL addresses. Picture the post-apocalyptic world where you're trying to send an e-mail to a friend, and his e-mail inbox is filled with e-mails hocking Viagra and promises of romantic trysts with nubile young webcam enthusiasts named Candy (she saw you on one of those sites, she thinks you look super cool, you shuld[sic] go to her website,) to the extent that your buddy never finds your e-mail. The spammers can pay - you can't, neither can your sainted grandmother, political non-profits whose mailing lists you've subscribed to, orphans, and many others. Hope you like spam, it's all you'll be reading.
That's not the worst of it though, the broader conceptual concern with the most potential impact is that if this is precedent setting, it's not just the fact that your inbox may be rendered more cluttered and crappy than it already is, it's that you could end up in a world where you can send as much e-mail as you want, but you have to pay per e-mail if you want it to get anywhere.
