Maybe of interest to find out more about the pros and cons and what
will be the result of this if implemented:
---
"Email -- Should the Sender Pay?"
EFF Fundraiser, Debate Between Esther Dyson and Danny O'Brien
In light of AOL's adopting a "certified" email system, EFF is hosting
a debate on the future of email. With distinguished entrepreneur
Mitch Kapor moderating, EFF Activist Coordinator Danny O'Brien and
renowned tech expert Esther Dyson will discuss the potential
consequences if people have to pay to send email. Would the Internet
deteriorate as a platform for free speech? Would spam or phishing
decline?
WHEN:
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
WHAT:
"Email - Should the Sender Pay?"
http://www.eff.org/bayff/
On 15 Apr 2006, at 01:22, Dave A. Chakrabarti wrote:
I received an email today from the EFF that really brought home to
me how urgent this net neutrality debate really is. If you're like
me, you've been thinking that it's important, but haven't really
understood how or what you can do about it, or why it's so
urgent...everything seems to be played out in political power
circles at a relatively slow pace, while life here in Chicago has a
million demands that I have to attend to that just seem much more
immediate.
That changed for me today. For those of you out of the loop with
AOL's involvement in this: AOL has recently proposed a filtering
system that allows corporate users to pay a fee to bypass someone's
spam filtering. If you have an AOL account, this means that AOL can
charge me to send you a mailing. Or it can ask the DDN to pay a fee
to make sure these emails continue to get to you. It can send spam
back to your inbox even though you don't want it there...because
spammers tend to have a *lot* of money to spend if it means
bypassing someone's spam filters.
Now they've taken it to another level. If you send someone an email
asking them to take a critical look at AOL's new policy, your email
will be filtered out. That's right. If I want to email a friend of
mine who happens to be using an AOL account, and I even mention a
certain website, AOL will bounce the email back to me saying that
user doesn't exist. You know what? Since this email contains "AOL"
and "filter" and a bunch of other terms that look suspiciously like
I might not be asking you to buy AOL stock, members of this email
list *may not* receive this email. If I include the actual URL I'm
talking about (a site designed to ask AOL users and others to ask
the company not to move forward with this), it's *guaranteed* that
members of this list will not receive that email. Or receive any
other email from today, if they're receiving DDN list stuff in
digest form. Someone at DDN is going to get a bunch of bouncebacks
that look like those addresses don't work anymore...but wait, they
do! They just don't work if you're trying to make people aware of
what AOL is doing.
So there it is...the first salvo in the net neutrality wars. Or
perhaps the nth salvo, if you ask Sascha Meinrath or others who've
been talking about this for months now. AOL is censoring its email
service in a direct effort to control what information its users
have access to...hoping to stifle debate on this in the process.
Ironically, in doing so, I would think they've shot themselves in
the foot. They're claiming this was an effort to "protect" their
users from spam...but now those users are becoming aware that there
is email they are not *allowed* to receive anymore which really
does *not* look like spam. Some users have tested this by sending
themselves email on this, to their AOL accounts, only to have them
bounce. Presumably, we shouldn't think about this too hard either,
or big brother will be angry with us. We might not get our shiny
AOL CDs in the mail anymore.
Seriously...what were they thinking? Couldn't they at least have
built an intelligent filtering system that allowed users to bypass
this filter when sending to themselves, or sending to previously-
contacted email addresses...just something, so it might hamper
their efforts, but not make it so blatantly obvious what the
company is trying to do? Then they could at least *pretend* not to
be the evil empire. How hard is it to stick a bunch of if-then
logic gates in your filters to make things a little more subtle? I
can only conclude that the company simply didn't see the point of
taking those measures...they seem to work on the basis that they
have complete and total control of their customer base. (Given
their product, this is stunning).
What's next? If my blog criticizes AOL, does that mean that anyone
using AOL or Time Warner can't see my site anymore? Can Microsoft
build an operating system that doesn't allow users to visit
getfirefox.com, because it's a competing product? Wait a minute,
didn't the courts smack MS with some serious fines (here and in the
EU) to specifically prevent this, back in the IE vs. Netscape days?
I'm not even going to speculate on what Comcast or SBC could do
with this precedent...they're probably sitting up and salivating.
Does this mean Bush could cut off all access to anti-Bush content,
or even critical discussions of the current situation in the United
States or in Iraq, by paying the corporations a certain amount?
Wow...that's so much easier than all this coopting the press and
fear-mongering stuff. Could a company cut access to critical
content to make their products look better online (AOL's doing
precisely that, after all)?
In every one of these scenarios, we're giving an entity with money
total control over what we see, hear, and say online. To think that
this will not eventually affect how we think is naive. Would we
think Osama Bin Laden was so terrible if this had been the case a
decade ago? What if he'd had more money than the Bushes and all we
saw when we got online was pro-Islamic propaganda, with access to
Myspace cut off in favor of OsamaSpace? What would our kids grow up
thinking? Are political lines going to be drawn based on which ISP
we use?
So what we do? I'm hoping wiser minds than mine will chime in at
this point (from non AOL accounts) and give me some suggestions. I,
for one, am planning on contacting the few people I know who do use
AOL, offline, and explaining to them why I think it's time they
switched email accounts...no matter how long they've used it, or
how attached they are to it.
I'm cc'ing a few others on this list who might have something
valuable to contribute to this dialog...please excuse the cross-
posting. My sympathies to whoever's managing the bounces on these
mailing lists, especially if we have a lot of subscribers from AOL
accounts.
How do we stop the internet from fragmenting?
Dave.
-------------------
Dave A. Chakrabarti
Projects Coordinator
CTCNet Chicago
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(708) 919 1026
-------------------
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