Any time liberal and conservative activists join forces to confront a corporate behemoth for committing crimes against the Internet, you can be fairly confident the protesters have a legitimate beef ... except when they're completely out to lunch.

Such is the case with last week's pointless caterwauling against plans by AOL to offer Goodmail's CertifiedEmail, a premium delivery service designed to help legitimate bulk senders get their messages through to their intended targets. Fronted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MoveOn.org and RightMarch.com, a diverse coalition of 70 organizations has launched a noisy crusade to convince AOL to abandon the plan.

AOL's response in a nutshell: Nuts to you. . . . Good for AOL.

Here's an excerpt from the coalition's open letter under the headline "Stop AOL's E-mail Tax": "We wish to express our serious concern with AOL's adoption of Goodmail's CertifiedEmail, which is a threat to the free and open Internet. This system would create a two-tiered Internet in which affluent mass e-mailers could pay AOL a fee that amounts to an 'e-mail tax' for every e-mail sent, in return for a guarantee that such messages would bypass spam filters and go directly to AOL members' in-boxes. Those who did not pay the 'e-mail tax' would increasingly be left behind with unreliable service."

Calling certified e-mail a tax is an excellent example of the intellectually dishonest rhetoric that pollutes so much of public discourse these days. No one has to pay AOL a nickel if they're not interested in the premium service and their e-mail will continue to be treated exactly as it is today. . . . Try telling the IRS you're just not interested.

As for second-class bulk mailers "being left behind with unreliable service," that will happen only if AOL executives decide they really don't want to be in the e-mail business anymore. Suggestions that the company will let standard service wither to prod customers over to certified e-mail ignore the simple reality that AOL has competitors.

Fearing that perhaps I was missing an element of merit in the coalition's complaint, I turned to Paul Hoffman, long active in IETF affairs and director of the VPN Consortium.

The certified e-mail service "is rope that AOL . . . can hang themselves with," Hoffman says, "but who cares?" Of those who object to premium e-mail services, he adds: "Of course they object; they don't want anything to cost them any money. Well, neither do the people who send spam."

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