Protest Over AOL's Pay-to-Send E-mail Plan

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UPDATED: If politics makes strange bedfellows, “certified e-mail” is making a lot of disparate groups downright kinky.

This afternoon, groups from across the political spectrum — from the Gun Owners of America to MoveOn.org to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) — will all bed down together to rise up against America Online’s (AOL) plan to charge for certain classes of e-mail.

“Under AOL’s recently announced proposal, large e-mailers willing to pay an ‘e-mail tax’ can bypass spam filters and get guaranteed access to people’s inboxes — with their messages having a preferential high-priority designation,” an EFF statement claims.

AOL does not see the proposal as a tax on e-mail users.

In early February, AOL said the idea is to guarantee certified bulk mailers a fee for free passage through the company’s filters and other anti-spam devices.

AOL maintains the plan adds a “voluntary, additional layer of e-mail delivery” for assurance that the e-mail will be delivered. The company also adamantly insists that AOL will maintain it free e-mail service, along with the AOL Whitelist and Enhanced WhiteList.

In announcing the plan, AOL said it had already signed up the New York Times and the American Red Cross as customers for the new service.

Yahoo is considering the same idea and, like AOL, maintains the idea will decrease the spam and identity fraud scams that plague the Internet.

“Companies can continue to send e-mail to Yahoo! Mail users at no cost in exactly the same way they always have, and we are not planning to require payment to ensure delivery to our users,” said Yahoo spokesperson Karen Mahon. “In the coming months, Yahoo will test an optional certified e-mail program based on transactional messages only, such as bank statments and purchase receipts, as an additional layer of protection against scams and phishing attacks.”

The end results, though, the new coalition maintains, will be the same: “Charities, small businesses, civic organizing groups and even families with mailing lists will have no guarantee that their e-mail will be delivered unless they are willing to pay the ‘e-mail tax’ to AOL.”

While the EFF and Free Press are co-hosting the Tuesday afternoon press teleconference, MoveOn.org is the organizing force behind the movement.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.