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.
So I take it that the attitude "look, the idiots signed up for AOL; they deserve all the spam/blocking/insults they get" is no longer in vogue?
Pity.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I suppose that it is nice that these people are looking out for AOL user's best interest, but I doubt it will have any significant impact. It is obvious from their shrinking membership that AOL doesn't have a clue as to what their users want. I don't have anything against AOL, but I also don't see what they are offering to make their service any better than other, much cheaper services. Additional SPAM for their customers doesn't make things any better. I'm convinced that AOL is trying to kill itself.
Smeghead every day of the week.
"... representing such organisations as the EFF and Craigslist... "
...and Moveon.org and the Gun Owners of America, and Civic Action, and the Cancer Online Resources etc...
In total this coalition has more than 15 million people in it according to USA Today.
BTW, AOL just announced that it is going to be raising its general monthly fee as well. Either they will drop this e-mail tax crap or they will lose those idiots who are still subscribed to their "internet" service
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
A pay-to-send system won't help the fight against spam - in fact, this plan assumes that spam will continue and that mass mailers will be willing to pay to have their emails bypass spam filters. And non-paying spammers will not reduce the amount of mail they throw at your filters simply because others pay to evade them.
Captain! Abandon ship, the spam is coming in droves and cannot be stopped!
Yahoo! Here we goooo...
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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.
for each piece of mail that leaves their system to us?
Panic now, beat the rush!
Both options sound good. I'm not sure which is better...but I don't really care.
Seriously, who do they have in charge over there? Is he drunk or something?
AOL have several good reasons to introduce the 'E-mail' tax and very few not to. The reasons for are
- Increased profits
- The can say to 'mom and pop' users, their biggest user base, that they're trying to do something about spam.
- Increased profits
The reasons against are- They might piss off some people they don't care about
- Er....
I don't see this as the most difficult decision they're going to make.init 11 - for when you need that edge.
AFAICS this wouldn't be an issue for 'legitimate' mailers anyway - Their emails probably aren't designed to circumvent anti-spam filters in AOL no more than they are in any other ISPs mail servers. This means that the only emails affected are the ones AOL know are bypassing the filters... so call me old fasioned, but if you know they are bypassing the filters you know the emails exist, ergo you can update your filters. I wonder how AOL plan to identify legitimate personal emails from mailing list emails o.O
Just don't create a file called -rf.
now the dufus' computer in the next cube is going to start saying, "You've got premium mail!"
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Where the hell do you get "charity group spam" out of "other legitimate free mailings lists that people sign up for"?
Signing up for a mailing list makes it, pretty much by definition, not spam...
Like the whole "We're no longer going to sell ADSL connections, instead we'll sell "AOL for Broadband" a monthly subscription service you buy on top of net access.
I though thte onl;y reason anyone signed up in the first place was because they knew it was an easy way to get online?
AOL really are trying their damnedest to screw themselves over by the looks of things.
I can see where AO-hizzy is coming from, but here's why: Like most of you here (that actually work), you probably do something regarding the Internet. The company I work for provides network access for Wholesale Dialup ISPs. It costs money (you know...economic energy...believe it or not) to pay for bandwidth that spammers waste sending their emails that for some ungodly reason, morons still open and click the links in them. It costs money to pay for the software filters that are in place to remove unwanted spam. It costs money to pay technicians/engineers to maintain the servers that filter spam. It costs money for the servers that filter spam. Am I making a point yet? Now, do I agree that AOL is part of the Evil Empire? Yes. $21+ per month for sub-par dialup internet access is bullshit, no matter how you look at it. However, bulk mailers should be helping to foot the bill of extra bandwidth, extra hardware to handle that bulk mail, etc etc. I don't feel bad for them. What you really need to start keeping your eye on is the system of the Tiered Internet that Ma Bell, Verizon & Comcast are trying to create. AOL is trying to cover the costs of bandwidth waste...these greedy ass companies are trying to privatize YOUR internet and make things unavailable unless you pay more.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
2. Advertise your service as: the last truly free (as in speech) Internet. (no DRM, no censorship, no [bittorrent|skype|other] filtering, no stupid ideas... EVER!)
3. ???
4. Profit!
I believe step 3 has something to do with advertising on Slashdot, but I am not sure.
* ring ring. ring ring. *
Hey, Sergey? Yeah, hi. It's me, Larry. Got an idea for you. Yeah. All that dark fibre. Yeah. And that crap Bellsouth's been trying on lately. That too. And we already get plenty of free press on /. and everywhere. We could really make a killing. Right. Might have to change the slogan a bit, though. Bit of a joke now, yeah? Got a new one to try on you: 'No stupid ideas - ever!' Got quite a ring to it, no? I'm feeling lucky, I tell you...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
If AOL users were the type to do that, they'd have done so already. This will succeed. I know too many AOL users.
I am trolling
This is one way AOL will finally wither and die. When people start realizing that it will cost more to send/receive emails to users on AOL, they will finally stop accessing those accounts for email thereby reducing the number of subscribers. Sure, it will take a while for this to actually happen, but don't give up hope.
Moveon.org and and Gun Owners of America supporting the same thing???? THE WORLD IS ENDING!
If you don't want to pay the "tax", don't! And then see what penalty you have to pay. The penalty is that your email has to be filtered for spam -- which is exactly what is happening now. So why is the "tax" a bad thing?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
It's not like AOL already doesn't block access to things on the Internet they deem unacceptable. Even things that are completely legal in all sense of the word, they decide to block. You just get a "Page could not be displayed".
.. then too bad for their customers. I dont use em.
I run a double opt-in mailing list (they sign up, they receive confirmation, they confirm, THEN they get email) for Classic (75-79) Honda Goldwings. We have AOL members on the list, and we will NOT pay any kind of tax. We'll just tell the users (before AOL goes to this "Tax") that if they get the list emailings, then great. If not, blame AOL. It sure won't be our fault.
I've never had email delivery problems, except by one RBL a long time ago (some obscure one, too). They've since shut down.
But AOL decides to do this crap
= Grow a brain...
boo hoo. non-profit people having to pay to send out messages?? cry me a river.
Who ever said that a form of communication was free, either in people's effort expended to send/receive the messages, or the cost of hardware to carry the messages? We all pay right now (implicitly) for the cost of keeping massive amounts of storage around for all this junk we get every day. If someone can come up with a workable system to tack 0.1 cent on every message that causes people (and spammers) to more carefully weigh the value of the crap they're sending out, I'm all for it.
Call me conservative, but having people decide what they value for themselves and judge how badly and at what cost they want to send an email is (in principle) better than having some uber-authority decide what constitutes spam or not. Clearly there is a market for some things that you get spam for. Let them decide how much it's worth to spam.
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
This can be looked at by turning the tables against AOL.
When SBC wanted to charge Google for "using their bandwidth for free", I always thought Google's response could have been, "If your ISP is throttling the connection you're paying for, here's a list of ISPs that give you what you're paying for."
I wonder if this can be turned around on AOL by saying if you sign-up for their service, they won't let our emails through. If this is not okay with you, here's a list of service providers that provide you with full service.
The only way this will become acceptable is if the consumer agrees with it and there are service providers to choose from that do not do this.
"There is no substantive news here, just because some disparate groups of advocates have come together for an event reminiscent of the bar scene in the first 'Star Wars' movie." -- AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham
(article at http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/02/28/email. rebellion.ap/index.html)
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.
It's really quite simple for me
Blacklist all of AOL - you cut US off, we cut YOU off
No problem - I've looked through my address book, and there is very little traffic I want from AOL anyway
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
...Spammers find a way to charge AOL user accounts for the spam they will undoubtedly send.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
Spam sucks. The amount of spam I need to filter on a daily basis for my not-so-well-known domains is huge (40-50% of all incoming email). I make it manageable with the use of greylisting, realtime black lists, enforcement of correct smtp handshakes, content filters, virus filters, yada yada yada.
.. There is no doubt that their spam to legitimate email ratio is MUCH higher than mine.
Fortunately a lot of this gets axed with the greylisting and rbl's so I am not having to accept the full message (bandwidth + cpu processing). Even trying to be conservative, there are false positives as well as spam getting through the filters. It sucks.
Now looking at AOL, it is one of the most popular domain names on the Internet and millions use aol.com for their email. Spammers see aol users as generally "newbies" and as a result, is a great target for spamming
Needless to say, it is a big problem for AOL. Even with a lot of the blocking they are currently doing (outright IP blocks) and undoubtedly many of us have experienced (especially hosting providers) it still is mostly ineffective in their fight against spam. Spam continues to be a major nusciance and phishing schemes continue to get much more stealthy and hard to discern.
So whats the solution? Some of you point to SPF but if AOL only accepted email from domains with SPF, that would be much more restrictive than this tax concept (though with a major player forcing this issue, it might make SPF viable even though it does represent some major hurdles of its own (use of a secondary SMTP to deliver legitimate email (very common)). Honestly it sucks. I don't like the tax idea, Bill Gate's war on Spam didn't seem effective, the use of extremely long chains of spam/virus/malware software are more of a short-term roadblock than a true solution.
moveon.org has a bad reputation in the antispam community. They don't process unsubscription requests or bounce messages reliably. They have no one but themselves to blame for this situation. Even if they were to pay Goodmail Systems to send to AOL, complaints would just get them banned from Goodmail Systems. If you send bulk emails, you MUST respect unsubscribes and bounces, or you WILL get banned. RFCs aren't just *Requests* For Comments. They're more like demands.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
AOL obstensibly became spam crusaders when it cut into their bottom line. What was the #1 thing their users complained about two years ago? First most, pop-up and banner ads on AOL's sign-in screens--and secondly, the volume of spam had increased exponentially over the years. This poll was taken because the amount of customers leaving AOL were significant and measurable.
If these problem return customers will simply move to alternate providers. That's how it works. The service provider field is already extremely competitive, let nature simply take its course.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
>What this means is AOL can look for any large volume of nearly identical messages and move them straight to the spam bucket. That means not-for-profit mailing lists. Think the linux kernel mailing list, mysql-users and hundreds or thousands of other lists, large and small.
>Sure, spam volume for AOL users will decrease dramatically, but at what cost?
Am I mistaken in remembering that AOL will pass through any email sent from people in the user's address book? If so, when users sign up for a mailing list, have a little notice telling them to add the list's address to their address book if they subscribe to AOL (which will be obvious from their email address). This is a bit of a hassle, but it doesn't seem to be a catastrophe to me unless such a whitelist doesn't exist.
The problem I see with this scheme is not what it will keep out of the users' mailboxes, but what it will allow in. If my spam filter started "failing" because senders decide to pony up some cash, I'd be rather pissed.
I don't see why this is so hard. Let them charge for allowing companies to bypass the spam filters, fine no big deal... IF they also allow users to opt out of any such paid email.. This would still require that the senders have the user's permission to send, but prevent the sender from getting trapped by a stupid filter. So am I the only one to figure this out? This pay for spam has the makings of a really great idea, but it is there yet..
Either they will drop this e-mail tax crap or they will lose those idiots who are still subscribed to their "internet" service
You're probably wrong there. As a service becomes "regular," especially when it's charged to a credit card automatically, as many internet services are, most people are just going to let it go.
Here's an example. I like to think I'm not an idiot, but it took six years for me to figure out that my homeowners insurance had been ratcheting up until it was costing twice as much as it should have. Why? Bill comes, write the check, move on. I was too busy to notice what was going on, let alone look into it. It took our getting ready to sell the house for me to take a serious look.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
and dump AOL.
It really doesn't merit much more discussion. AOL is a company that provides services. There is nothing that says "AOL CAN ONLY MAKE MONEY BY PROVIDING SERVICES TO EMAIL 'READERS'". AOL wants to provide services to email SENDERS as well as email READERS.
If you as a READER don't appreciate the services that AOL provides, take your business elsewhere.
Duh.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
STOP USING AOL!!! Get with the times people, piss on AOL and be done with it.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Glad somebody else realized this - let market forces take them down. Customers won't be happy when they don't receive all their email, and I'm sure as hell not going to pay for AOL subscribers to receive mail from me (or from the three rather large mailing lists I moderate). I'm sure most other individuals and mailing lists aren't going to pay, either - just the spammers who want through. Net result, less real mail and more spam to AOLhell land.
If this goes through and people start complaining they can't get mail off the lists anymore, my reply will be - we adhere to standards, it's your ISP that sucks, maybe you should consider getting one that doesn't screw you over.
little bespoke message board thing. When a user signs up it sends them a single email, with a URL they can click to validate their email address.
These suddenly started to bounce back from AOL. I went through hell trying to convince them to remove me from their spam filter - I really didn't consider one email sent it reponse to a 'click for email validation' button to make me a spammer - but AOL did (quick check showed over 2 years I'd sent about 150 emails to 150 unique AOL accounts).
I guess I could pay to take advantage of AOLs new offer, or just do what I did, and refuse to accept AOL users - no great loss - join me.
For years they have angered anti-spammers with it.
I say, more power to AOL in this case and I hope they tell the EFF to shove it. Its not like the EFF has made all that much a difference in the past anyway.
Dont get me wrong. The EFF has had many laudable goals over the years. But today we have DRM everywhere, DMCA, **AAs suing little old ladies without computers, P2Ps shutting down left and right, processor IDs are gone only to be replaced by the WPA hash, absurd patents being granted as much as ever, and now it looks like they are going to try reintroducing the child protection law that was struck down by the SC. [sarcasm mode=dripping]WOW what an effectual organization.[/sarcasm]
If I were AOL I would be laughing my a$$ off right now.
I don't see what the big deal is. At this point my feelings about AOL subscribers are about the same as my feelings about people who voted for George W. Bush twice. I respect their intrinsic value as human beings, but I can no longer take them seriously as members of society. So who gives a rats ass about what they do or do not receive? Get a better inbox, get a better ISP while you're at it. In other words - in my book AOL subscribers already exist in a lower tier of the already divided internet, and AOL asking for money to access that tier is just another layer of absurdity, putting a final spit polish on that turd.
And on the flip side of this, why should AOL give a rats ass what mass mailers and electronic freedom hippies say about them? If the customers raise hell about not getting five thousand action alerts from some nonprofit they signed onto once five years ago, or about spammers buying unrestricted access to their inboxes for a quarter cent, they might listen. Otherwise? Money talks.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
It's not a tax because AOL isn't the government. It's simply a change in the fees they charge for the services they provide. As a free customer, you can take your business elsewhere.
You'd be looking to move back into Mom's basement in two years when this scheme further angers their users.
Join AOL, and get GUARANTEED spam! Or get a Gmail account and have it all filtered.
Many moons ago, Borland and Ashton-Tate and WordPerfect were all legitimate competitors to Microsoft. They made a progression of dumb decisions and Microsoft made smart ones. History repeats, with Google in the Microsoft spot and AOl as Ashton-Tate.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
If AOL wants to make a mistake like this, why not just let them? Will it piss off their users when spam starts flowing again? Of course it will! People will leave, case dismissed. Why on earth would the EFF (or anyone else for that matter) want to stop AOL from losing customers?
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
See, on one hand, AOL may be shooting itself if the foot (hehe)...
On the other, this could be a "money makes you a legitimate, spammer" precedent.
--
I hate these choices.
"...objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences, subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny." -Gould
Would you want to pay for a montly fee and $10 to just send the same data in a 'special format'?. If AOL is serious about 'email fees' it would only increase P2P communication outside of the email client.
Like myself and presumably other users, the end user does not care about how much the adminstrators are being paid, boo hoo to all of you ISP deskjockeys, since all the end user cares about is the precieved value of the networked service and how much little money that the end user has to invest.
Meh, it'll just make AOHell users sign up for gmail/hotmail/yahoo/whatever accounts instead.
No one wants to pay for something when they can have it for free.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I divert Bonded Spammer mail to a separate folder. Let's see what's in there:
That's Bonded Spammer's track record. Let's see how AOL does.
When one thinks about, the bulk email tax AOL is proposing isn't such a bad thing. Yes, it won't eliminate the spam from companies paying for it, but at least it will reduce the viagra and refinance spams. And the paid-for spam can always be eliminated by the regular spam filters.
In the end, for the average user the spam level is probably reduced and companies stupid enough to pay AOL for the right to spam will have less money left to spend it on other annoying schemes.
The only bitter aftertaste left is, that AOL will make money out of it - assuming it really find people willing to pay for the priviledge to spam AOL-users.
AOL can do whatever it wants. Just ignore it.
."
The better response is to make it absolutely, brilliantly clear that your service doesn't support AOL.
Stick a "Doesn't support AOL" banner on your website, put up a link saying, "AOL's mailservers no longer support the advanced technology used by the rest of the industry. Please upgrade to MSN, Yahoo, Gmail, or any of the other, reliable free e-mail providers out there. If you have any questions or concerns please direct them to or
Better yet, some one like hotmail or gmail should hop on this train and start a "switch from AOL campaign." What better way to grab users then to scare them off using _valid_ scare tactics?
We don't do business with any AOL users (just checked). The only AOL e-mail I have to deal with is one of our co-worker's private accounts. If he can no longer receive company e-mails, I'll laugh at him.
Hell, even if you do have a billion AOL customers, subscribe to this service for the SHORT-TERM only. Send each and everyone of your customers a nastygram every 2 weeks indicating that you are dropping AOL support, because their "outdated e-mail technology is no longer compatible with the rest of the web." Most people using AOL have had it forever; it won't take much to convince them AOL is ancient. Advise them to switch to an "up and coming" service like Gmail, and they'll switch, at least for your business related e-mails.
A wide variety of companies used to do this with all kinds of services. Internet Explorer, Active X, even AOL and internet access (back when AOL offered nothing but proxys). The key is not where the blame actually lies (AOL's supposed fight with spam), but to instead portray AOL as a white elephant that is no longer keeping up with the times.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
AOL requires us to pay in order to ensure emails about your order are delivered to your aol.com address.
If you have an alternate email address that is not on AOL, please enter it _here_ and the charge will be waived.
Earlier, these same please-don't-charge-me people were arguing that the market solution was not feasible, it was technically impossible, spammers would continue anyway, and that the cost would be raised for those POOR agencies that send millions of unwanted emails, are still fishing for reasons why paying for emails won't work. They are really reaching now.
That a for-profit-corporation (dirty word to some) would determine, through careful business analysis, that the socialist ideal of free mail is a joke and a detriment to the functioning of a free society is anathema to them.
Watch what happens when other services see that the improvement is internet efficiency is apparant and company email accounts are not flooded with junk.
IMO, the system will become universal and bandwith will open up tremendously. And watch the spammers go out of business.
Bill
Someone please mod parent up, +1, Insightful
Shame on Google.
AOL's policies are sometimes amazingly stupid and shortsighted, at least from a business point of view. I do tech support for a very widely used internet product, and whenever we get a call saying "I'm sending email but it's not being recieved," the first question we ask is "Are you sending it to an AOL user?"
This is another step in their outdated, customer-alienating practices. It is further proof of their over-inflated ego; they may have a large userbase, but more and more of their subscribers are realizing how poorly the entire organization is being run. Sooner or later it's all going to come crashing down around them.
So, we should just tell other companies to advertise they're 'easy to use' ?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
ok its just really this simple D-O-N-T....U-S-E....A-O-L
Now this situation. The intent may have been to limit spam, but it seems to encourage it more than limit it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Please AOL, do this. I can't wait to see your market share drop by 50% :) :)
Manufacturers of radios and televisions are seeking to charge radio stations and television stations a fee to allow their signals to bypass the channel tuner and arrive as audio or video signals on the devices. When asked for a quote, manufacturer representatives responded "The manufacture and distributuion of radios and televisions is not free ... someone has to pay for it."
... "Er .. Ah ... ... no comment"
When asked their opinion on the matter, several radio and television owners were baffled that this was even an issue. Said citizen Sans A. Clue, "Of course this makes sense. I mean if the broadcasters don't pay for these devices, then who will?"
Zero__Kelvin, member of the online community 'Slashdot', radical common sense advocate, and self-proclaimed technology industry pundit expressed a different view, stating "The consumer has already paid for the manufacture and ditribution of these devices, and the manufacturer has already made a substantial profit. The manufacturer and the consumer entered into an agreement that they would receive the signals broadcast on the channels to which they tuned. By allowing other broadcasters to pay a fee and bypass the channel tuning system, the manufacturer is in violation of that contractual agreement.
When asked for a response to this point, various TV and Radio Manufacturing company representatives were in universal agreement as to the response. Said the executives
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I said it a a week or so ago, and I'll say it again, with flavor: AOL, is an evil, EVIL, empire.
AOL is like most other companies. They are racist against everyone not rich, regularly insult the poor with their advertisements (see: Cave Man commercials, I forget the company that makes it). AOL has two objectives and it does not care what it takes to achieve them: 1. Earn money, and lots of it. 2. Insult, degrade, deprave, and ultimately make your customers, and the lowly cavemen ingrates that make up the bowels of society (IE Normal people) lives hell. It IS their fault if they are: 1. ugly, 2. poor, 3. stink, 4 are dirty. All taken from a sarcastic viewpoint, cheers people! Nevertheless I think this is genuinely what corporations and especially AOL think.
So AOL wants to sell their addresses to spamers who will then pay them to send AOL customers special offers that bypass the spam filters. Then AOL gives the message a special symbol to show its legit. This means that every message with the extra symbol is spam so it can be ignored.
Unfortunately, looking at the cause and effect in that way is problematic. You can say all you want that SBC or AOL is at fault and try to get end users to switch, but many people may not even notice. All they will start seeing is Google's site performance is slower now. I think it's actually a tossup whether they blame their provider or Google, particularly if they don't understand what is going on.
A serious slow down to Google could ruin it particularly if they use the strategy I expect them to. SBC or whoever will partner with certain key competitor portals or sites in various sectors. Then those partners will get discounts or rebates on tier pricing on Tier 2. Tier 1, which is today's internet will continue to operate with the same equipment and some upgrades, but it will never recieve another major upgrade in a timely fashion. Tier 2 will be up to date in a timely fashion and basically be maintained like or even slightly faster than today's "free" networks.
So what happens? Initially Tier 2 will only be slightly better than the free internet, but as time goes on, Tier 2 will eventually outstrip Tier 1 markedly. Because of the partner deals, complaints about slowness can be turned into referrals for the "faster" partners.
Think about it. Google will eventually slow down and when people complain about Google response times, SBC support will say, yeah, they don't pay for premium service, but try our partner... MSN Search! And lo and behold, MSN Search is super fast! Google pays up one way or the other (it's own fiber or payoffs) or they croak. Bandwidth and response times are the Idiot Kings of the Internet.
More on topic, AOL can use the same sort of incrementalism to eventually change the model of the Internet with bulk mail. They have a bunch of users that they can effectively control: those who think of AOL as The Internet. And thing is, AOL may lose subscribers daily, but there's still a metric crapton of them. They still have enough market penetration to really have an effect on things.
And guess what? You may be upset about non-profits not being able to get to people via email, but if you think about it, one person's gold is another's crap. You *can* be spammed by non-profits. Just ask anyone who has been a blood donor how annoying they could be in the past about getting you to come back. Non-profit bulk mail is still bulk mail. And many people will not shed a tear if they don't get it.
Further, I sincerely doubt that most mailing lists of the discussion group size will be affected by this. Even the largest can only touch the edges of the numbers of email addresses touched by bulk email marketers. Even if you have as many as 50,000 members on your listserv, that's a blip to bulk mailers who send literally a billion messages a day. Will the Red Cross or AARP have to pay? Yeah. Will the Goldwing Antique Cycle group or even the NANOG list have to pay? Probably not.
If the Telcos/AOL take the incremental approach, the Internet-as-we-know-it may never go away entirely, it will just be left behind. It will become the dial-up of the future. You can do anything you want on it, but the user traffic is going to grow and the bandwidth needs will grow in such a manner that the Old Internet will cease to be viable for the new technologies. To keep up, you will need to go Tier 2 or be left in the dust. But if you want to play MUDs instead of WoW for the rest of your life, you may even be okay.
Maybe.
I am amazed by how impulsive most of the comments are to the idea. First it was AOL and general sentiment was, well they're a crap company anyway so it's expected from them, they don't care about customers and want to profit. After Yahoo's name was mentioned the rage started to tone down.
It seems clear to me that this is by far the most efficient way of reducing spam. Spam represents today over 80% of all email traffic. An average spammer earns $1000 for 2 million messages sent (http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123597, 00.asp), i.e. he makes 0.0005 cents per email. If AOL or however else charges 0.5c/email that translates into $10,000/2,000,000 messages which means that a spammer would lose $9000. Ultimately is pretty simple math, if it costs more to send a spam email that money you make from it then you won't do it.
It may be that 1c/email is not necessary, and companies could see the same effect by charging 0.01c/email. This will not bankrupt anyone. You can send 1000 messages for 10 cents. The benefits would be enormous: huge decrease in spam sent, less time spent keeping up spam filters, less time deleting spam. Jupiter research reports that in 5 years the average user will be exposed to 830 marketing impressions/day, double of the number today (http://www.jupitermedia.com/corporate/releases/02 .09.24-spamreport.html). I don't take these numbers too seriously, but I believe the trend is that spam is increasing because it's the cheapest way to advertise.
I don't believe at all that "even" AOL is trying to profit from spammers or consumers. The benefit they would get from 80% less email immensely greater than revenue from charging a fraction of a cent per email. I know for sure that this solution was also discussed at Google because it's so effective in stopping spam, but the even bigger issue than initial public backlash, is how to handle micro payments. A credit card company charges a few cents per transaction so for a value amount of 1c you pay the cost many times more in transaction fees (just for that and AOL and Yahoo won't be making any money from this). Having cheap way of handling micro payments without losing money on fees is almost impossible in the current system. Credit card companies can't do it, Paypal can't do it, Google can't do it. Google will lower the cost of micro transactions but anything less that 10-50c will still be unprofitable. At the same time having to pay for email is also a huge disadvantage for spammers. Money has to come from an real account and that is infinitely easier to trace than an email account. Anonymity of spammers will be much more difficult to hide and that is a huge deal. Of course, so will be anonymity of everybody else but that is a separate discussion.
Why can't they just send a nice little letter to their subscribers at AOL, saying that due to company policy users with AOL accounts will have to change their email, as they will stop trying to send their newsletters to AOL? And add a check in subscription form that will politely inform user why her/his AOL account is not good for receiving mail...
Hyperom.com
The complaints about this are largely based on strawmen and misrepresentations. I love the EFF's work in other fields, but they have a long track record of showing no clue at all about spam and spam-related questions.
I've read the specs, I've talked to the people, and I do not believe the hype; this is not a "tax on email". It never was.
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So, the next thing that's going to happen is that AOL will offer tiered email subscription to their customers: for a few extra $$/mo, you can avoid even the certified spam. Then for a few more $$$, companies can send certified spam to the people with premium email... an endless cycle of spam.
Maybe this will finally alert AOL-users to just what a crock of $#!+ their service really is.
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-
I am half owner/operator of www.GM-Diesel.com We have a forum for people interested in GM's line of diesel trucks.
Out of 8,150 total users 1,007 have AOL e-mail addresses.
That is almost 12.5% !!!!
I don't think that people like me can just simply "ignore" 12.5% of our user base!
When that number drops below 5% it might be possible. Until then (and I believe it is well on it's way) we all have to deal with it.
Libertas in infinitum