There's a petition afoot to get AOL to cease charging money for reliable email service. (The charge is to the sender. If you don't pay, AOL may choose not to deliver your email ... or simply hold it for a few days first. How's that for customer service!)
Hawk Wings (a new favorite blogger who writes about Apple widgets and gizmos) reports:
Over 50 organisations have written an open letter to AOL asking it to rethink plans to use Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail, which the letter describes as “a threat to the free and open Internet”.
The groups range across the social and political spectrum from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the Gun Owners of America.
I still fall back to the question I asked before: Why would you subscribe to AOL when they are extorting money from everyone who might want to get in touch with you?
The petition says, in part:
The bottom-line is that charging an "email tax" actually gives AOL a financial incentive to degrade email for non-paying senders. This would disrupt the communications of millions who cannot afford to pay your fees-including the non-profits, civic organizations, charities, small businesses, and community mailing lists that have arisen for every topic under the sun and that make email so vital to your subscribers.
And what if other Internet service providers retaliate and start demanding their own ransoms to accept mail from your millions of users? Your company works hard to simplify the Internet. Don't start a surcharge war that will complicate it with tiered services and dozens of middleman fees for every simple act of communication.
I don't have any statistics, but I know several people who have ditched AOL for gmail and other services so they can get reliable email service. It's only a matter of time before those same people wonder why they pay a premium for AOL's notion of "a better internet" when it's worse than what you can get from a less pernicious ISP. There are plenty of affordable ISPs and free email services.
If you feel strongly about this issue, go ahead and sign the petition. But the real convincer will be the bottom line. AOL will change if they start losing money from this policy. (At least that's the theory, but who knows what the management will decide?)
Otherwise, hey, they're getting paid to deliver emails they used to deliver for free. If the stick-up works, the perps will continue their hold-ups.
