Ransom

It almost sounds like that urban legend that makes the rounds on the Internet every couple of years. You know: the one warning us that the Post Office is going to impose a 5-cent surcharge on every piece of email--and telling us to forward the warning to all our friends? That one?

From the p3 It-Would-Be-Funny-If-It-Weren't-True files comes this little gem in this morning's NYTimes:

Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

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. Thy also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.

As I noted last spring:

From the beginning, the World Wide Web was a source of irritation to corporate America: There were all these people--millions upon millions of "web surfers" (remember when that's what they were quaintly called?) out there . . . and no one could figure out how to make a dime off of all this.

Well, no one except the ISPs, I should say. True, Google, PayPal, and Amazon have figured out how to use the web's resources to create specific services that drive sales. And with relatively secure ordering and payment systems, retailers have moved catalog sales and customer relations to the Internet without much trouble.

But the real money is to be made at the fundamental level of access itself. Which is why, for example, the telcos are fighting the idea of public WiFi and generally looking for legislative protection to monopolize access to the Internet.

As Paul Maud'Dib observed, whoever has the power to destroy a thing controls it. If AOL and Yahoo have the power to block corporate emailer's access to me, they control the internet. Period.

Now I'll grant you--a system that would cut down on the Herbals/Mortgage/OEM spam I get every day is something I'd greet with an open mind. Same--even more so--with phishing attempts (a rarely-used online account of mine was suspended not long ago because I didn't believe the renewal advisory notices from them were really from them).

But the price--at least in the AOL/Yahoo model--would be steep: Not only would the system filter out unsolicited bulk email be filtered out, but airline updates, order confirmations, catalog offers, etc., might be caught in the filter as well if they don't pay "postage"--which is, here, a polite euphemism for "protection." And that could escalate; as one analyst in the Times article points out:

As for companies that send e-mail, "some will pay, but others will object to being held to ransom," he said. "A big danger is that one of them will be big enough to encourage AOL users to use a different e-mail service."

The result of that scenario: Certain online services--let's pick one most people like, such as Orbitz or Expedia bargain updates--will only be available to people with the right email provider. And the Internet will have taken a big step toward becoming a limply regulated monopoly like the cable industry.

(Oregon angle: How's your cable bill lately?)

This is not the way we want the Internet to work.

Fittingly, the Senate Commerce Committee's hearings on net neutrality will be webcast live on Tuesday the 7th.