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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