Slashdot Mirror
Opposition to AOL's 'Email Tax' Growing
An anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting that opposition to AOL's proposed 'Email Tax' that would create a two tier email filtering system is growing.
DearAOL.com, representing such organisations as the EFF and Craigslist, has written an open letter to AOL asking them to reconsider. "
This system would create a two-tiered Internet in which affluent mass emailers could pay AOL a fee that amounts to an "email tax" for every email sent, in return for a guarantee that such messages would bypass spam filters and go directly to AOL members' inboxes
So this wouldn't stop spam, it would just help AOL profit off of it. Companies that do spam will be weighing out their average gains against the cost of sending mass emails, and I'm sure many will decide it's worth it. I'm sure they would be thrilled to know that their emails can bypass spam filters for a few dollars. Meanwhile, charity groups, e-zines, and other legitimate free mailing lists that people sign up for will be screwed. It looks to me that AOL is taking the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach.Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
Who cares what AOL does anymore?
I'm sure that for most companies, the proportion of their customers who have aol.com email addresses is dropping each year. As long as this idea does not catch hold in the growing domains like hotmail and gmail then we can just laugh as AOL gets more and more desparate to find a new angle for growth. This is not that angle.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Sorry to rain on the parade, but there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. I'm sorry that AOL's (and others) plans to impose email charges on bulk mailers is going to raise the costs of some respectable charities and other nonprofits. But, the last time I bothered to check, sending bulk mail via the postal service was not free. So why should sending bulk mail over the internet be any different?
We've all become spoiled with free email on the internet, but when you think about it, there's no more right to free email than there is to free postal service. And as we have all seen, free email is probably the primary culprit in the rise of spam and many of its associated ills. So it is likely that anything that imposes additional costs on spamming will have some reducing effect on the overall volume of email. No, it won't kill all spam, but it will likely be enough of a barrier to some portion of small time operators and n00b phishers. And the bulk mail that one does get will have a greater probability of being from a legitimate source.
Free email isn't likely to disappear anytime soon. It is still a good marketing tool for those that provide it and a gateway to their other premium services. But I hope that the days of being able to send thousands and thousands of emails at no cost are coming to an end.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
AOL may have implmented it slightly wrong but charging a postage stamp for e-mail is exactly what need to be done. We need some form of micro payment system for sending e-mail. One concept here is that the payment is only collected if the recipient marks the mail as spam, otherwise it's refunded.
The idea of charging for a resource you have already paid for in other ways or is otherwise free is an almost universally accepted concept in ecomonics as the best way, on a large scale, to avoid the trajedy of the commons. It's been noted since there were people to note it that livestock herders always overgraze public shared lands but generally they manage their own private land sustaibly. It's one of the primary arguments in favor of private property rights.
Taxes are not always about raising money. Recently it's been proposed that there be a tax on trades at stock exchanges. This would act as a damper on excessive day trading activity. (some day trading activity is good because it arbitrages the market inequity and increases liquidity, but too much increases volatility).
Sometimes this same effect can be done with a refundable deposit rather than a tax. For example, when a bank takes in a deposit of money, it in turn must give some percentage, say 10%, to the federal reserve bank to hold onto. It's not a tax since it will be given back if the investor withdraws his funds. But it has a dampening effect. The bank will now loan out 90% of the deposit to other people who will buy things and those sellers will put their money back in the bank. At the end of the day there is 10 times as much money in circulation. If the federal reserve had not taken it's witholding that cycle would multiply the amount of money in circulation indefinitely.
So taxes or deposits can be good public policy. If we could charge everyone just a small amount extra for e-mails, even if they have paid for thie ISP already it's a good thing. If we can make it refundable like a deposit system it's even better. It's no different from the fact that people who graze on public lands already paid for the lands once in their taxes, but if we charge them an extra fee per head of cattle they don't overgraze.
But there's technical problems to implementing this micro payment system which is why AOL is trying simpler systems first. But this would work even better if everyone did it not just AOL.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If AOL goes through with this, I'll just scrub all AOL email addresses from my mailing lists. If AOL subscribers complain, I'll tell them to complain to AOL, not me. I'll also tell them if they want back on the list(s), switch to a provider with a clue.