Postage for email?
Related to the subject of the previous blog entry is the announced plan by AOL and Yahoo to offer users of email preferential treatment for a fee. The NY Times has an article that gives some of the details. By paying 1/4¢ to a penny each for messages, users would get expedited service. Here is an excerpt from the article:
The Internet companies say that this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users of their services. The two companies also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.
AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users’ main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gauntlet of spam filters that could divert them to a special bulk e-mail box or strip them of images and Web links.
Now, if this were only about making heavy users pay more for sucking up a lot of bandwidth, I could see the rationale of a charge, especially if the first 100 or so messages per day were free. That would keep the cost of email for ordinary users where it is. I can also see that hitting spammers with a charge would be a good thing. Unfortunately, AOL proclaims out of one side of its mouth that it is fighting spam and then out of the other side it says that you can pay to avoid spam filters. The providers can claim that they are fighting spam but it looks more like they are trying to add revenue.
The present email system is heavily burdened with spam, phishers and worms so there is good reason to reexamine the way that the present email system works. The fact that there is basically no added cost for email service, no matter how many messages are sent, has certainly led to abuses. The “tragedy of the commons” is a well-known phenomenon. Some method of controlling heavy usage, including fees for big volume, is worth considering but the plans put forth so far look more like revenue-raisers than attempts to reform the system.
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