Goodmail Concessions Welcome, But Not Enough

11:00 AM Mar 07, 2006

On Friday, AOL made a qualified concession to the DearAOL campaign against the paid Goodmail distribution channel, offering to pick up the cheque for nonprofits to accredit their e-mailing programs for non-Goodmail distribution. The DearAOL coalition took it as a good first step with more needed to follow: a vindication of the principle combined with an insufficient response:

Today, AOL conceded the central point of our coalition-that AOL's pay-to-send system would create a two-tiered Internet with one standard of email reliability for the big guy and an inferior standard for the little guy ...

AOL's proposal is a small band-aid for a small number of professional nonprofits, but does not end the threat to the free and open Internet's greatest benefit -- a level playing field that allows everyday people to turn small ideas into big ideas.

(Not to mention that even with AOL's concession, small businesses and other private e-mailers are still SOL.)

It's this two-tiered deal that's really at stake here, and it's an Internet-wide issue -- including, but scarcely limited to the specific filtering and distribution patterns of one specific ISP.

That's what makes responses like Larry Seltzer's earlier denunciation of the DearAOL coalition a bit myopic. (Hat tip to Earthworks' Alan Septoff via the DemocracyInAction user group.) What follows is my own take and in no way represents that of my employer or the Goodmail coalition as a whole.

Seltzer and other Goodmail critic critics have a point that the rhetorical fire may be of a heavier caliber than called for. But the disconnect is in whether one's frame of reference is the immediate, limited change AOL is contemplating, or the larger-picture issues at stake.

Most of Seltzer's arguments are accurate in a static, context-free environment. Suppose AOL does Goodmail exactly as described, the system doesn't change, and nobody else does anything like it: the sky doesn't fall.

But it's a dynamic space. And one of the crucial dynamics at the moment is the attempt by various large entities to establish revenue-generating service tiers. Seen as an entree on that menu, the program has a considerably greater -- and, admittedly, more nebulous -- power to injure. If Goodmail sticks, it's not likely users will be flooded with paid spam, nor that legitimate communications will be excluded en masse. But it can happen at the edges as regular whitelists tighten -- another 5% likelihood of a legitimate newsletter filtered into the trash, the occasional sponsored ad hitting the inbox as the waters are tested. I doubt anyone's plotting what happens next. Contingencies in the environment will determine it -- if users and mailers accede to the system; if AOL's market power leads others to adopt similar measures as a de facto standard; if it forms a point of synergy with phone and cable companies trying to impose fees on Internet traffic through their "pipes." It could become quite a ferocious beast, could fail to develop, could fade away as another failed business adaptation.

What's hard to argue is that Goodmail isn't at least an attempt to cut costs and make money by tightening e-mail filtering in a way that will affect mass-mailers.

Goodmail's case is couched in the language of spam protection, but its defenders keep cagey on precisely how it would really decrease junk mail. AOL and Pivotal Veracity's webinar on the subject indicates the same spam filtering channels remain for non-Goodmail messages; Goodmail simply offers a fast track around them. What's implicit, if the spam argument has any merit at all, is that those existing tracks gradually either erode away or become more actively restrictive for bulk-mailers, who (even if legitimate) generate occasional spam complaints with statistical inevitability.

It amounts to fighting spam by changing the definition: turns out your newsletter is in the bulk mail file because the sender doesn't meet our anti-spam licensing standards. That this is already done to some extent in no way creates a blanket precedent that invalidates any possible objection to something as gross as a fee-per-email regime.

Spam, at the end of the day, is in the eye of the beholder. To you and me, it's the Cialis discounts that pour in overnight to await your bleary-eyed return to your desk. To an ISP, it's messages that impose on the delivery agent the costs of the sender's business -- whether the business is boiler room stock tips or Hurricane Katrina donations. The form of those costs are a little different (stock tips cause consumer aggravation and may result in dropped subscriptions), but they're still costs you can reduce to a dollar value. Goodmail is an attempt -- embryonic, but unmistakable -- to change the balance sheet by externalizing costs that to date have been part of the cost of doing business for ISPs.

AT&T capo Ed Whiteacre infamously demanded of Internet businesses making money by delivering content to his subscribers without paying him rent, "Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?" AOL, once the Internet's most well-appointed walled garden, is asking an awfully similar question about its users.

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