The NY Times reports that AOL and Yahoo! plan to implement a new email certification program that will ultimately force commercial emailers to pay a fraction of a cent per email to deliver their emails. The program, discussed throughout the week in the trade press (here, here and here) envisions a multi-tiered approach to email:
- email from an address within a user’s address book would proceed directlly to the user’s inbox
- email that is certified (ie. paid for) would also proceed directly to the user’s inbox
- email that is not certified would pass through AOL’s spam filters. The NY Times reports that one in five legitimate commercial emails is blocked by the filters. Moreover, the filters frequently strip links and images from the email.
AOL’s defence of the program sounds much like the ISPs who defend a two-tiered Internet. It argues that there are different classes of service with regular mail and that this program simply replicates that approach for email. Marketers, many of whom opposed taking strong legislative measures against spam, now find themselves facing significant additional costs to getting their email delivered.
I see several problems here. First, the new program has seemingly little to do with spam since we’re dealing with legitimate email. It appears that this is really about a new revenue stream for providers such as AOL and it may help push the ISPs toward further differentiation of quality of service.
Second, should the revenues become significant, the program may ultimately create an incentive to limit the reliability of anti-spam filtering. If this does generate millions of dollars (as the Times suggests), then AOL may find that it is profitable to have spam filters that block lots of legitimate content since that will encourage more senders to pay the certified email fees. Indeed, the program flips the traditional incentives since the less reliable the traditional email systems, the more valuable the certified email programs.
Third, AOL plans to discontinue a program known as an "enhanced white list", which currently allows certain reliable email senders to get their email through without it facing the prospect of being blocked by spam filters. AOL now says that it will eliminate the enhanced white list by the summer, forcing senders to sign up for its certified email service.
Fourth, the new costs will hurt users (who will pay indirectly for these new charges) and many non-profits, activist groups, and smaller businesses, who simply won’t be able to afford these new costs.
Mass mailers are whining. 1, 2, 3… aw
I’m not an AOL subscriber, but if I was, I’d be cheering this story.
You posted a few links in your story. It seems that the main “victims” complaining about AOL’s actions are “mainsleaze”, aka “respectable spammers in pinstripes”. These are the same people who fought tooth-and-nail against the US do-not-call list. They also lobbied successfully to castrate US anti-spam legislation. The resulting “CANSPAM” act is often referred to as the “YES-YOU-CAN SPAM” act.
THE DMA (Direct Maketing Association) and its fellow travellers are not about stopping spam. They are about stopping the flood of email from small-time scammers, and replacing it with a flood of email from “legitimate mass mailers”. There is no real difference, other than the fact that so-called “legitimate mass mailers” pay money to lobbyists and to legislators’ election campaigns.
Marketers’ lip service to “opt-in” is honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Their whining about being restricted to specified IP addresses is a transparent ploy. This only hurts the “email marketers” who find themselves constantly in blocklists, and constantly hopping from IP address to IP address in an attempt to by-pass blocklists. All that a *REALLY* ethical mass-mailer (are there any?) has to do is put their “From:” emailing address on their web page, and ask AOL users to copy+paste it into their address book. Then AOL users who *REALLY WANT* to receive marketing email will get it, not those who don’t.
That thought drives marketeers nuts. Imagine… a world where people only get advertising they want, and aren’t constantly bombarded with unwanted advertising. How disgusting. And it’s “bad for business” too.
It’s About Consent, Not Content
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So-called “legitimate mass mailers” want a very restricted definition of spam that exampts them. I don’t care whether my inbox is overflowing with ads for porn or for “respectable mainstream” stuff. I want it stopped. And, no, I don’t want a zillion exemptions for “non-profits, activist groups, and smaller businesses”.
I wrote about this here
http://theheadlemur.typepad.com/ravinglunacy/2006/02/youre_getting_m.html
This may be a good thing
I don’t want non-profits or activist groups to be sending me unsolicited mail. If I solicited it, then I’d be happy to pay their cost of sending it to me.
But where this could be a good thing is that it will create a “sender pays” infrastructure. I’d love to tell people they need to pay a dime to send me an email. (I’d happily pay that for the ones I send, too, as long as it was mostly going to the receiver, not the carrier.)
Right now I have no way to collect, but if this scheme goes ahead, AOL and Yahoo will have to create a way for senders to pay. They’ll be expecting to pocket the money, but really, they’ll just be creating a market. If they pocket all of the money, then a competitor will come along who will give a share to the customer, who will allow you to name people who are allowed to send for free, etc.
A good idea? Think again…
I Don’t know what Mr. Murdoch has been smoking, but I have never personally seen, nor read about, a business model that competes in the market place by sharing revenue or profits with the customers it is wooing. Well, that’s not true. To say i have never heard of a successful one would be more accurate.
Creating a “sender pays” infrastructure is exactly the last thing you should want implemented. Right now, whatever sort of email service you use, the terms of use are pretty much sending and receiving as much e-mail as you want for a set fee. In other words, email currently uses the “all you can eat” model. If one group of senders suddenly needs to pay to guarantee delivery to your mailbox, then the only “market” that will be created will be the broadening the “sender must pay” group as much as the market will bear. In an unregulated marketplace, this group ends up being everyone.
This is what happens once you open this door: Company A is labelled spam. So Company A pays a fee to every ISP that Company A wants to send mail to. Company B is not labelled spam so gets to send for free. Company A screams and yells about “anti competitive behaviour” and “corporate rights and “blah blah blah”, result being company B gets on the “certified list” and now is paying to send mail too. Repeat this process until every company is now paying to send their email. Individual users will end up fitting one definition or another as a sender which needs to be “Certified” to send one place or another, so don’t worry about being left out of the fun.
Now, because the offending email has been “certified”, you can’t block it at all. Unless you buy an extra tier of spam filtering. Now the sending vs. filtering arms race is on, resulting in a complicated and cumbersome system where every mail is now ranked and charged a toll by every ISP it passes if it wants to get through to your mail box.
Now you, and the rest of us are paying for email like it was snail mail, or a long distance call. The price dictated by how “Far” it must travel to its recipient, and how “fast” it gets there- since even if you are a legitimate sender, the filtering softer won’t know that unless you’ve been appropriately tagged- and how has this affected the amount of spam you receive? It hasn’t. The names will change but the volume will remain the same.
How on earth can this be a good thing?
My apologies.
It was not my intent to be so rude in my comments. I’m sorry.
🙂
My apologies.
It was not my intent to be so rude in my comments. I’m sorry.
🙂
How it could be a good thing
Spencer Armstrong doesn’t see how a “sender pays” email model could be good, because he thinks ISPs will not also adopt the “receiver earns” part of my proposal. He thinks the current “all you can eat” model is better.
The current model is certainly very friendly to spammers. I don’t hide my email address, so my filters catch about 1000 spam messages a day. There are strategies I could use to reduce that, but they generally inconvenience both me and legitimate senders of email, so I’d rather not adopt them. I’d rather adopt a strategy that particularly targets the spammers, and I think the “sender pays” model does that.
Armstrong is right that ISPs would like to pocket the revenue, but the ISP market is very competitive. He says he’s never heard of a case where a business shares revenue with its customers. Well, I’d suggest he look at the web advertising model.
I can get a free web page in various places, and the host will keep all the revenue from the ads it displays. Or I can set up my own server (or pay a fixed fee for one), and put Google ads on it. Google gets some revenue, I get some revenue. Both models exist, and both are successful.
I suspect the “sender pays” email market would be the same. If there were a way to tell a sender that they needed to pay X in order for their email to go through, and it was widely supported, then a number of different schemes would be possible. Some would be like the ones Armstrong is worried about: the host would keep all the revenue. Others would allow the user to keep a portion of it. Some would, as Armstrong fears, turn off all filters for senders who had paid. Others wouldn’t. I certainly wouldn’t choose to use a host that kept all the money and forced me to see all the spam that came through, but some people might.
The reason this would be a good thing is that it would allow me to have a choice I don’t have now. Right now the “all you can eat” model is the only one.