"E-mail tax?" ... EFF off the mark
By Paul McNamara on Tue, 02/28/06 - 3:55am.
Any time both liberal and conservative political activists are aligned against big business on a particular issue, you can be pretty gosh-darn sure the protesters have a legitimate beef.
Except when they don't.
Such is the case with a gathering crusade against plans by AOL and Yahoo to offer Goodmail's fee-based CertifiedEmail, a premium delivery service designed to help legitimate bulk senders get their messages through to their intended targets.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, MoveOn.org and RightMarch.com will be front and center today trumpeting a diverse coalition of political and business groups the organizers say are intent on getting AOL and Yahoo to abandon their plans. You can read all of the loopy scare-mongering at MoveOn's Web site under the ludicrous headline: "Stop AOL's E-mail Tax."
While EFF and MoveOn do good work, generally speaking, it's difficult to overstate how far off the mark they are on this one. What AOL and Yahoo are proposing is no more of an "e-mail tax" than HBO is a "cable tax."
Paul Hoffman, director of the VPN Consortium, has been one of my go-to guys on e-mail and spam issues for just about 10 years now. And he minces no words in assessing this protest.
"The EFF has lost its mind," he says.
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."
If your company or organization isn't interested in the premium service, then you don't pay a nickel; AOL and Yahoo insist that you'll get the exact same service you get from them today. And if that proves not to be the case, well, the only losers there will be AOL and Yahoo.
"It is rope that AOL or Yahoo can hang themselves with," Hoffman says, "but who cares."
And it's not that Hoffman believes AOL and Yahoo are on to something terribly useful here. Far from it.
"We have known for at least five years that mailing lists will become less and less stable ways of letting people who want particular information (political, commercial, or whatever) get it reliably. AOL has had multiple levels of 'known goodness' for mailing lists for years; Goodmail's scheme is nothing new or interesting."
"The degradation of mailing list deliverability was the motivation for many of us to work on Atom in the IETF. Syndication feeds are not susceptible to spam, and they can be read by anyone, even those who don't have feed readers. The fact that neither MoveOn or RightMarch has a syndication feed is probably just a temporary mistake on their part, and they will soon discover that their feeds are much more effective than their mailing lists."
Let's assume their silly protest is also a temporary mistake.
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Paul quoting Paul
I go into a bit more detail here.
It will be interesting to see how long blog comments last here before they are discovered by blog spammers...
What do you mean "discovered"?
I've already had to disable trackbacks here because 99.9999% (roughly) were spam and they were sucking up way too much CPU time. Fortunately, Drupal's spam filter does an excellent job (knock on wood) with spam, at least, so far.
Spam sure makes us nuts
Some of the EFF's positions on spam have indeed been unpopular with some because we don't think it's anywhere near time to throw the baby (of open email) out with the bathwater just to fight spam. We would love to see it stopped, of course, but not at the price of centuries old cherished values of how open communications work in a free society.
AOL, like all ISPs, should deliver legitimate mail to its users. That's their first duty -- primarily to the user, but there's also a valid debate about the general architecture of E-mail to be had, since AOL handles so many users. They can block all the spam they want -- this is a question of what they do with real, solicited bulk mail and person to person mail (solicited or unsolicited.)
What Goodmail means is that AOL is, rather than doing that duty, blocking a fair bit of legitimate mail. They are in effect selling "protection" from their own filters, because those filters are doing an imperfect job.
So imperfect a job, that it is felt that senders are so afraid of being falsely blocked that they will hand over serious change. That's the goodmail busines model. People will be so afraid of non-delivery that they will pay for protection from the filters that should never have been blocking them in the first place.
You think it's way off the mark to be worried about that as a precedent? About what it means for the architecture of e-mail (now one of the world's most important media of speech)?
Now, to be fair, there is another component of the goodmail program, which is beyond assured delivery and display of images, namely an expensive certificate program. It's been possible to sign mail and get a certificate from various CAs for many years, and I am sure many senders have been hoping that mail user agents (like AOL) would start noticing those signatures and display an indicator that the sender of the mail is certified. Nothing wrong with that, but I expect senders didn't think there would be a large per-message bounty on doing so. At most there were going to be fees from the trustable certificate authorities, one-time fees or annual fees.
Sure, E-mail tax is an inflamatory term. I wouldn't have chosen it myself. It's a metaphor for a scary concept.
What surprises me is that you're standing up to defend the idea of paying for protection from something that shouldn't be blocking you in the first place. Especially on something as important to a free society as e-mail.
Response to Brad
(The above "anonymous" posting was from Brad Templeton of EFF. Blog commenting software has a long way to go...)
You think it's way off the mark to be worried about that as a precedent? About what it means for the architecture of e-mail (now one of the world’s most important media of speech)?
Yes. It sounds like you trust market forces so little that you think users won't leave AOL (or anyone else doing a poor job of delivering mail) for service providers who are doing a good job. History has shown that belief to be wrong.
Of course, if this system were instituted by a government, it would certainly be in EFF's purview. But that's not what is happening.
Sure, E-mail tax is an inflamatory term. I wouldn’t have chosen it myself. It’s a metaphor for a scary concept.
It is also factually wrong. It is quite dissapointing to us early supporters that EFF's legal understanding has fallen so low that it does not understand the difference between a "tax" and a "surcharge".
What surprises me is that you’re standing up to defend the idea of paying for protection from something that shouldn’t be blocking you in the first place.
I'm glad that surprises you, because it is wrong. The article is very clearly critical of AOL for using Goodmail in the way that it is, and for its habit of incorrectly blocking legitimate mailing lists.
It won't stop with AOL
What everyone seems to be missing in this is that this will NOT stop with AOL. AOL is just the first. If this policy happens to be allowed to continue, and AOL starts making massive profits off of email delivery, do you think that Yahoo, (who has already publicly expressed an interest) MSN, NetZero, Earthlink, People PC ect. won't jump on the bandwagon? Of course they will. No CEO of any ISP is going to sit back and watch other companies make record profits off of something so simple (Believe me they will be record profits, simply look at current email rates) and not want to give their shareholders that kind of quarterly report. And also believe me, if this works, if it is allowed, it won't be but a few years before this "Surecharge" is applied to every single email. The only question is how long it will take for people to accept it. Thank you, sincerely, Virgil Fritz.
If this is such a slam-dunk ...
... why has it taken so long? These premium e-mail schemes have been around for many years.