AOL: Screw you, we're taxing email anyway

By Cory Doctorow at 10:37 pm Friday, Mar 3

Following on from a coalition launched by dozens of campaigning groups who opposed AOL's plan to charge a tax to guarantee delivery of the email they send to their supporters, AOL has vowed to deafen its ears to their pleas and proceed with its plan to establish a two-tier email system. AOL's spokesman An analyst sympathetic to AOL even used the word "piffle" to dismiss the grave concerns of the organizations, which come from all points on the political spectrum and represent millions and millions of supporters:

"Balderdash and piffle," replies Jennings. "Nothing's really changed. If users are complaining about some e-mail, service providers will block the sender, whether or not they pay some sort of a bond or fee. There's no substantive change here. If you're an existing sender with a good reputation, you should have nothing to worry about . . . well, nothing new anyway.

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

Update: Erik Olson sez,

My answer to AOL's two-tier email will be simple. Once they start doing this, this will be placed in my sendmail access file:

aol.com		550 AOL doesn't pay me to accept their email

I'd encourage others to do the same. Should enough do so, AOL subscribers might get annoyed that large portions of the Internet refuse to even accept their email.