AOL and Yahoo have proposed a system to charge senders a quarter of a cent for guaranteed delivery on each email sent to their customers. They justify this as an anti-spam measure, but of course it could make them billions, is unlikely to eliminate spam, and will undermine the ability of activist groups like MoveOn and others to correspond with their supporters. The justification AOL offers for this is that it could make email just as good as postal mail.
"The last time I checked, the postal service has a very similar system to provide different options," said Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesman. He pointed to services like certified mail with return receipts, "where you really do get assurance that if what you send is important to you, it will be delivered, and delivered in a way that is different from other mail."
Just as good as postal mail. Hooray. Of course, you can always just tell your friends that they have to cancel their email accounts with their local ISPs and switch to AOL. I wonder if Yahoo will pay me $0.0025 for every email I receive at my mail server from Yahoo subscribers? I could clean up! Or is it only giant oligopolies that get to tax the rest of the Internet?
(via MeFi)
Update: A reliable source sez, "One of Goodmail's competitors told me: 'Goodmail is sharing 80% of stamp revenue with AOL, and they gave AOL a big piece of the company in warrants to launch with them and kill their enhanced whitelist.'"
Update 2: Patrick sez, "Charles E. Stiles, an AOL postmaster says 'AOL has no plans of terminating the whitelist.'"
