What's In Your Wallet? No, Really. How Much?

12:00 AM Feb 12, 2006

AOL's pay-to-play e-mail scheme was born to stir up discontent.

The anti-spam nonprofit Spamhaus, whose registries of spamming ISPs are widely used by network administrators, charged the Goodmail toll road "will destroy the spirit of the Internet." TrimMail's E-mail Battles is nothing but cynical. The Electronic Frontier Foundation opened up with both barrels. And MoveOn, which would be on the hook for a few million to Goodmail its heavy list traffic, blasted this alert to its AOL subscribers this week asking for user petitions to strangle the creature in its crib.

Ted Leonsis, the hip-ish AOL vice chair, pooh-poohs the worries, also backing down from the initial plan to throw the whitelisting baby out with the bathwater. Whether that's a result of online outcry or, as Ted claims, merely a correction of a misstatement is up for debate. AOL's longer spiel in that weird institutional-blog-speak proliferating these days (complete with emoticon!) is here.

Particularly motivated readers can register for a Wednesday webinar to get the full company line.

No matter how one slices it, it's a fight over creating different classes of access with big money on the line; given that, it's hard to imagine any way this won't work out privileging established entities with deep pockets and brand names. (Unless it doesn't work at all, of course, which is a distinct possibility.)

So it's interesting how closely this parallels the contemporaneous fisticuffs over net neutrality, the more abstruse but potentially far-reaching question of whether ISP "pipelines" like Verizon and Comcast should be allowed to engage in preferential treatment based on pay-for-play to deliver content to subscribers.

As Lawrence Lessig noted in his congressional testimony, the architectural change implied by such a scheme would undercut the fluidity, innovation and easy entry that define the Internet's charms -- for both nonprofits and businesses.

One of life's little ironies: Yahoo, which is supposed to join AOL on the Goodmail train, is one of the big names demanding neutrality from the delivery pipelines.

DIA community member Free Press is out in front on the net neutrality issue. Check their action page (not a DIA action) at http://www.netfreedomnow.org/.

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