The problem with the two-tiered internet is that customer choice is removed from the equation, instead one company holds the other hostage for access to customers.

Something along the lines of how product shipping is done might work though. For example, I purchase something from Amazon. I can choose next day delivery, 3 day delivery or 5-7 day delivery. When I pick my choice I pay a little more for each option.

If I know I'm going to be downloading a 100MB of MP3 from emusic.com, it would be nice if I could pay an extra $5 and boost the connection speed from them and drop a 10 minute download to a 5 or 2 minute download. But it should be MY choice. Not the ISP demanding money from services I have already paid to be able to access at a particular rate.

Some statements by Carl Hutzler from AOL, on his blog -
http://carlhutzler.com/blog/?p=6
http://carlhutzler.com/blog/?p=9

And of course several discussions at circleid - including
http://www.circleid.com/posts/future_of_some_email_may_not_use_email/

I do wish you'd stop pushing the blackmail meme. It is not blackmail, or an email tax, as you do seem to acknowledge in that circleid discussion.

There are lots of other ways for bulk mailers to stay on aol's enhanced whitelist, and their regular whitelist as well (such as - dont generate complaints from aol users .. simple, I think?)

Goodmail is going to be targeted at a small segment of emailers who deliver very high value content that is already solicited by the recipients - bank statements, air tickets, online purchase invoices etc.

Their price points are all aligned that way and it is those mailers who would find it most useful to have email displayed in the aol user's inbox with all images displayed, instead of having to click a button to display images [and well, thunderbird doesnt display images by default either - is that blackmail, or an email tax?]

A lot of the EFF response so far has been based on extremely bad data, most of it appears to have been released by other reputation vendors' - that is, goodmail's competitors - PR channels, and some even more distorted versions of the whole thing that have appeared on the website of the direct marketing association, and dmnews.com - again a marketing newsletter.

This is not going to affect person to person mail

It wont even affect the typical political email campaign, whether its left or right wing .. as long as the recipients of those emails actually asked for and signed up to those emails.

Well, I'll stop here. I've already pointed this out on various posts. But is there any problem at all with you, or Danny, actually calling Carl Hutzler or Charles Stiles at AOL and talking to them about these issues?

I'd suggest you or Danny - people with technical clue. Not Cindy, or anybody from moveon.org - I wouldnt trust them to overcome their basic belief that this is all a right wing plot, enough to listen to facts with an open mind.

Brad,

Where is the “internet cost contract” when a spammer sends 20 million daily unwanted messages and gets none in return?! We are not talking about a symmetrical exchange between ISPs (I’ll send you mail, you’ll send me mail, we’re both happy) but about a terrible asymmetry where some senders abuse the system. As a result, receivers got defensive and false positives became inevitable – legitimate, wanted, messages are mistakenly blocked – a collateral damage of the war against spam and phishing. CertifiedEmail is one attempt to fix part of the problem.

In the email space, the only contract that counts is the one an ISP has with its subscribers: I’ll do my best to give you the messages you want and to block those you do not.

Brad, you repeat here comments identical to those you made on CircleID. I particularly liked the fact you acknowledged there that the EFF is using inflammatory rhetoric not to your liking. May I suggest your readers should be exposed to the rebuttals you got on CircledID from Paul Hoffman, Larry Seltzer, Brett Watson, Suresh Ramasubramanian, Peter Bowyer, and yours truly:

http://www.circleid.com/posts/future_of_some_email_may_not_use_email/#comments

Peace,

Daniel Dreymann, Goodmail Systems

I dont hold any brief for goodmail - and nor is my criticism of the "dearaol.com" campaign really an endorsement that goodmail is a good product. I think its a decent idea in certain limited circumstances (transactional email gets auth'd, and certified for reputation .. and the rest of its benefits - message delivery tracking - are not my concern, theyre the concern of senders using that product, delivering to ISPs using goodmail)

But its not blackmail, its not an email tax, its nothing to do with an "internet cost contract"

I do think the EFF is way out in left field on most of its posts about spam over the last several years. And at least some of the tactics adopted by the EFF and supporters (including moveon.org) have tended towards pure FUD .. the first and very simple step being to cite examples of bad spam filtering - yes there are quite a few, and then tar every single spam filtering effort with the same brush (take a bow, Cindy and Annalee.. spreading FUD doesnt become any more right just because its done in the supposed cause of free speech)

Or, as John Gilmore does, run an open relay - and now, an open socks proxy, and claim its all for free speech and that John Perry Barlow cant send out email any other way when he's traveling somewhere in Africa. Surely someone who could write tar way back when can compile a mailserver that does smtp auth. And unless John Perry also needs a socks4 proxy to do his browsing when he's in Africa, I guess the proxy running on radio.toad.com could be turned off - it was being used to mailbomb the full-disclosure list with thousands of posts just the other day.

Yes - not your fault, Brad, I know that. But finding clue about spam issues in the EFF is getting really very rare. Forget clue, finding people who want to engage in a reasoned dialog instead of scoring cheap political points, is getting even rarer.

I know you can do far better than that. I wish you would do far better than that.

But being stuck in the past isnt doing him, or anybody else, any good.

And the basic motivation behind allowing open relay - as a courtesy to other users and operators on a trusted network, to provide extra paths in a time of highly limited connectivity, is long gone.

Staying firmly in the past just to keep the memory of those days alive?

I walk a tightrope all the time between blocking spam and delivering valid email. I need to do both. So yes valid email will get blocked from time to time - my team's job is to make my filters as fine grained as is possible (read: feasible and scalable) for me to implement without letting in far more spam than valid email. And to keep an eye out for false postivies, and for reports of false positives from our users, or from people who want to email our users, and get those false positives fixed, or worked around.

I'm actually pretty representative of the typical email postmaster at a large ISP .. I've met most of them, and they hold fairly similar views. You wont find those anathema to the EFF's mission, given that you dont like spam any more than we do, nor would you call spam free speech.

Never mind this discussion about goodmail .. several previous interactions I've had with the EFF leave me with the impression that your policy is that any server side, ISP operated spam filtering at all is bad, and is anathema with your position.

And all the examples that I've had thrown in my face to prove that position has been "bad" spam filtering - poor filtering decisions that are condemned by sensible email administrators as well.

That's about as good a way to argue as to point to a few corrupt cops, say, and then argue that the police shouldnt exist at all, and are anathema to the concept of justice.

-srs

ps: Thanks for giving me an idea. I'm probably going to do a BoF or panel somewhere this year, most likely at a maawg meeting - http://www.maawg.org .. A "top 10 no-nos for a postmaster / abuse desk operator .. and those top 10 no nos would all be quite similar to the examples of bad spam filtering I've seen from the EFF <- save of course the reasoning that all blocking of poorly managed political lists is a right wing plot .. our filters, based on user complaints and a few other things, are not too particular about the political color of a badly managed list.

Ref the latest dearaol.com release criticizing Esther Dyson's NYT article, and Esther's / Cindy's followup posts on the IP list.

It is fun to see that "your girlfriend is going to get charged for sending you email" meme trotted out time and again. Once, possibly.

Somehow, it seems to get a lot less funnier as that tired old meme (or should I say red herring) is dragged on and on.

Goodmail (or, as the simplistic rabble rousing goes, "email tax" or "pay to send email") seems to be targeting senders of bulk email as far as I can see. [and yes I am sure someone from dearaol will trot out the Pastor Martin Neimoller quote, or maybe drag out that other old favorite, the slippery slope argument]

And the dearaol coalition is somewhat concerned that CDT, and Esther Dyson are taking a more balanced view of the situation. The horror, the horror!

Esther felt she was misquoted by dearaol.com's press release on the subject - I dont exactly blame her. This campaign has degenerated into pure astroturfing of the sort that routinely gets decried when the neocons engage in it.

-srs

> Didn’t condemn server side spam filtering as a concept. What
> they condemned was taking away user choice and awareness.

Call it one man, one vote, brad .. with a report as spam system replacing a ballot box (or even one of those diebold machines with their wonderfully chancy chads). So while you, or I would rather not see Bush in the white house, the man did get some votes, possibly even enough to put him there, given that he's there now.

User choice and awareness does come into play. As I said - most ISPs that filter spam do have an obligation to listen to their users, and to give a fair hearing to email / calls from people whose legitimate email they've blocked. Most ISPs do just that.. we certainly do.

A substantial part of our spam filtering (and AOL's, and yahoo's) is keyed to spam reports from our users.

But giving a fair hearing after blocking means that you do have a right to raise some issues which in your opinion led to the block. Could be a compromised script on a webserver, could be a mailing list that's generating complaints.

The feedback loops that AOL and we (and at least some other large ISPs) provide to bulk senders / ISPs is a way for them to stay on top of any complaints about email that they are sending, or their systems are originating, and to deal with them fast, before the volume of complaints gets high enough to trigger a block.

Just like elections, there's likely to be some dispute about filtering decisions as well, which is where actually listening to complaints about valid email getting blocked comes in. Have any of the people who have been fulminating about aol taxing email actually been blocked by AOL? And if so have they used the contact info - 1-800 number, email addresses etc - at http://postmaster.info.aol.com to contact the AOL postmasters? They are a wonderfully clued and responsive bunch of people, I must say, having met and interacted with most of them over the last several years

Spam's never been a content issue. It is speech - but the sort of speech (or shall we say communication) where the recipient bears most of the costs, and the setup and incremental costs for the sender of spam are trivially low.

e-postage and micropayment schemes of one variety or the other are just not new, and Daum Korea (as big a name among email users in korea as AOL is stateside) has long been using what they call an "e-stamp" scheme, where bulk senders buy online stamps to send email to Daum users, and where Daum users can click on the stamp displayed in email from these bulk senders, to vote on whether or not they actually want / solicited the email .. with some provisions to provide free stamps to nonprofit senders, and to discount / make stamps free to a sender if lots of Daum users said they wanted their email. Sorta kinda like goodmail.

But Daum found it rather difficult to apply that system to senders from outside korea, and to even senders within Korea. AOL is not even trying to extend goodmail to try and charge Aunt Tilly ... they're targeting bulk senders of email as I said.

In other words, this or any other "pay to send email scheme" is NOT going to scale to charge all email. Ever. Read through John Levine's great paper on this - http://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf (and of course his "how bad is goodmail") http://weblog.johnlevine.com/2006/02/14#goodmail

I'll repeat that the goodmail issue - as has been a lot of the recent eff position papers etc on spam - is a tempest in a teapot. And an artificially created, and highly inaccurate tempest at that.

It is to oppose the way dearaol is running this entire campaign, with astroturfing and misquotes substituting for logic.

Oh - Esther's wrong, way wrong on this if she thinks this model is going to scale or extend enough that Aunt Tilly is going to find herself paying money to send email, but I do find the dearaol press release that says it exposes aol's secret and innermost longings.

Her article IS quite balanced for all of that. And the way dearaol put out a press release attacking it amuses me, a lot.

I make no claim to being nearly informed enough about the history and origins of the internet to make any useful claims about contracts and the like. I do, however, know more than enough to know that the solution to any problem with the internet, real of imagined, is not through Congressional legislation. Congress and government in general remaining hands off must be acknowledged by all as having been key to the success of the internet. To bring them in now would likely have devastating effects.

Two more cents...Congressional regulation of an industry that has thrived in its absence, is a mistake, imho. The problem net neutrality hopes to address is hypothetical at best, and the bottom line is that neither the market nor the FCC would allow a company to "squeeze its pipes." Telcos know that they must provide a quality product at a competitive price or the consumer will take their business elsewhere. I just don't see them abandoning the people who pay the rent. In addition, the FCC has the regulatory authority to stop a company from limiting, degrading or otherwise blocking services on its network. So why does Congress insist on imposing new regulations when none are needed?

If one doesn't like AOL's policies, isn't the best solution
to simply boycott AOL, or at least move to someone else for
email delivery if you don't like the way they handle it?

As for paying for email, well, as long is the cost is NEGLIGIBLE
to legitimate users, and high enough for spammers, I don't really
see the problem. After all, I pay about EUR 70, total, for all
internet costs (6016 kb/s DSL connection, VOIP, hosting for a
few domains, SMTP server for outgoing mail, backup MX server
independent of my hardware, etc etc). (Since I run a lot of
hardware 24x7, the cost of power is actually more than the EUR
70 mentioned above for non-power costs).

What the actual breakdown of the costs is doesn't interest me.
I don't know how the service providers calculate, and I don't
have to know or care. As long as they make enough to stay in
business, and the cost is not too much for me, we are all happy.

So, it wouldn't matter to me if I were to pay, say, 5 EUR more
for email and 5 EUR less for the backup MX server or whatever.

I pay (as part of a package deal which includes much, much more)
for the use of an SMTP server which, of course, is NOT an open
relay. When I started out, I sent stuff directly from my own
SMTP server, but, since I (now) have a volatile IP address (with
modern DNS services such as the highly recommended
http://www.dynaccess.com/ the cost of fixed addresses is too much
to justify the small gain in functionality), I noticed some people
couldn't receive my email, since they only wanted email from
trusted SMTP relay servers.

I think that's OK. In an ideal world, yes, this wouldn't be
necessary, but probably the most effective way of stopping spam
from reaching your eyes (as opposed to stopping spammers, which
one should still do since it clogs the network, but this is more
difficult and beyond what an individual can do) is to only accept
stuff from SMTP relay servers which do not send spam.

If I want to send more than I do, for example, a newsletter to
thousands of people, then I can pay a bit more, register a sender
address and also send these through the same server.

In essence, I am paying the provider of the SMTP server to keep
his server spam-free. I think he does a good job at a fair price.

All email reaches my computers directly. For a small fee, the
same provider offers spam-filtering and virus-scanning. (I prefer
to do these myself. I run virus-immune systems and prefer to have
information on the spammers for when I have time to take legal action
against them.)

Brad, you seem to be mainly a free-market kind of guy, so why not
just encourage AOL customers to move to a mail system with someone
else more to your and their liking? After all, there is nothing
like a boycott to get someone to change their policies, especially
if they lose more money than they make through the new scheme.

Here's a new twist on this question. Pretty funny

http://colonial-america.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_invention_of_the_internet

Brad, you seem to be mainly a free-market kind of guy, so why not
just encourage AOL customers to move to a mail system with someone
else more to your and their liking? After all, there is nothing
like a boycott to get someone to change their policies, especially
if they lose more money than they make through the new scheme.

If I want to send more than I do, for example, a newsletter to
thousands of people, then I can pay a bit more, register a sender
address and also send these through the same server.

Same for me. In fact, I don't even have to pay more, just register the address.