Groups mobilize to oppose AOL, Yahoo e-mail fee plans
Posted on Wednesday, March 1, 2006
A group of political and other advocacy groups began a campaign Tuesday to protest plans by America Online and Yahoo to charge high-volume senders of e-mail fees to guarantee preferred delivery of their messages.
AOL and Yahoo are working with Goodmail, a Silicon Valley company, which plans to charge between a quarter-cent and 1 cent for each message. The two Internet companies will get the bulk of the fees that Goodmail collects.
Those who decline to pay could continue sending mass messages, but their e-mails would still have to navigate the Internet providers’ spam filters, which mistakenly capture nearly a quarter of legitimate commercial e-mails every year.
The coalition of groups opposed to the plan rely on bulk e-mails to communicate with members and raise money.
“This represents a threat to an open Internet,” said Adam Green, civic communications director of MoveOn. org Civic Action, a left-leaning lobbying group.
His counterpart at the conservative-oriented political Web site RightMarch. com, William Greene, agreed.
“It’s actually going to restrict or have a negative impact on the free-speech activities of so many people across the country,” he said.
The companies noted that bulk e-mailers could still use their services for free if they were willing to forgo preferred service.
“Yahoo is not planning to require payments for businesses or organizations to send e-mail to Yahoo users,” Yahoo spokesman Karen Mahon said. “Companies can continue to send e-mail to Yahoo e-mail users at no cost in exactly the same way they always have.”
Richard Gingras, chief executive of Goodmail, also said the company planned to offer unspecified discounts to nonprofit senders of e-mail.
AOL will start using the Goodmail system within a month. Yahoo will begin testing the service several months later and will charge fees only to deliver messages related to purchases or financial transactions.
MoveOn. org is organizing the campaign along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group. They have enlisted about 50 other supporters including the Gun Owners of America, the Democratic National Committee and the National Humane Society.
The groups have set up a Web site, www. dearaol. com, which will have an online petition users can sign asking AOL to change its policy.
The fee will be a disadvantage to “charities, small businesses and even families with mailing lists that will have no guarantee their e-mail will be delivered,” Green said. “The magic of the Internet is that it is free and open to everybody so small ideas can become big ideas.”
MoveOn estimates that 400, 000 of the 3 million people on its electronic mailing list are AOL subscribers, meaning that sending a mass e-mail could cost $ 1, 000 to $ 4, 000.
Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation also argued that the new system would give Internet companies a financial incentive to let their standard e-mail service deteriorate.
“The only way you can sell a value-added service like this is by degrading the service you have now,” O’Brien said.
Messages from senders in the paid Goodmail program used by AOL will be highlighted as “AOL Certified” and will display images and links to Web sites automatically.
Messages from most other senders, who do not pay the fee, are delivered in a such a way that the recipient cannot immediately see the images or click on the links. Users will always receive messages from senders listed in their address books.
Gilles Frydman, president of the Association of Cancer Online Resources, a group that sends 1. 5 million e-mail messages a month to cancer patients, said he was joining the protest because he did not believe that AOL and Yahoo would continue to deliver his group’s messages without requiring payment.
“Have you ever seen a company that offers two services, one free and the other paid, provide as good a service to the free one ?” he asked. “It is guaranteed that the quality of service for those who do not pay will go down.”
AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said AOL had no incentive to degrade the regular e-mail service it provided to users. In any case, he said, the company stands to earn only about “as much of a revenue stream as setting up a lemonade stand on the corner” from the Goodmail fees.
Information for this article was
contributed by Will Lester of The
Associated Press and Hiawatha Bray of The
Boston Globe.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
