It’s never been easy to win a fight against people who buy ink by the barrel. The same may be true about those who buy bandwidth by the terabit — as a coalition fighting Internet giant AOL discovered lately.
America Online, the world’s biggest Internet service provider has apparently blocked e-mails on its servers containing links to the petition against the "CertifiedEmail" plan at DearAOL.com.
A group of 600 organizations that includes the AFL-CIO and the Gun Owners of America has been circulating an online petition protesting AOL’s plans to begin charging extra to route e-mail around its spam filters.
The Internet service provider, which has roughly 20 million subscribers in the United States, began bouncing e-mail communications with the URL "Dearaol.com" lately.
An e-mail sent by CNET News.com to an AOL.com address and containing the URL "www.dearaol.com" bounced back with a system administrator note that read: "The e-mail system was unable to deliver the message, but did not report a specific reason."
AOL called it a simple technical glitch and fixed the problem after a short time. The company’s critics denounced the blocking as censorship — and said it supported their belief that Time Warner Inc.’s AOL and other Internet service providers manage e-mail haphazardly.
Either way, the incident illustrates the delicate balance between democracy and Internet gate-keeping. How do Internet service providers clamp down on spammers without hampering the grass-roots campaigns taking advantage of the medium’s openness? And who has not had e-mail to a friend bounced back as spam?
"It is an example of our point: that they are arbitrary and capricious in the way they deliver e-mail," said Wes Boyd, president of online political group MoveOn.org Civic Action. "If AOL can just decide without consultation of anyone that they can censor a website, then what are the chances for democracy?"
AOL spokesman Nicholas J. Graham countered that the messages were diverted because of a software glitch that incorrectly labeled "a number of" websites as being related to spammers or scammers. As evidence of the company’s good intentions, he said, the campaign had spread online since its February launch without interference from AOL.
We discovered the issue, and our postmaster and mail operations team started working to identify this software glitch, he said.
We have been accurately and responsibly delivering tens and tens of millions of e-mails containing that Web link, and we will continue to do so, he said.
Since the petition started, more than 350,000 people have signed it at DearAOL.com.
Dearaol.com is a coalition of companies and individuals against AOL’s adoption of GoodMail’s CertifiedEmail, an anti-spam program that requires marketers to pay to ensure delivery of their e-mail messages and circumvent spam filters. The Web site contains an open letter and a petition that calls on people to protest what it calls an "e-mail tax" that would inhibit the Internet’s inherent free flow of information and create a two-tiered system.
AOL’s plan would offer ways for companies to bypass spam filters, for a fee. By forcing them to comply with certain rules, AOL contended, it could ensure the delivery of e-mail that its 19.5 million subscribers in the U.S. want and make it easier to block e-mail sent by spammers and con artists.
The e-mail tax, which could amount to a penny per e-mail sent, would essentially line AOL’s pockets for ensuring delivery for affluent mass mailers, while leaving others with unreliable service in ineffective spam-filtering systems, according to the site.
The group says it also believes the alleged blocking cements the view that an e-mail tax will harm free speech on the Internet.
Despite its quick fix, the hiccup adds fuel to a long-running controversy around GoodMail’s certified-mail program and various ISPs adoption of it. Earlier this year, AOL and Yahoo said they would implement the e-mail postage program because with the rise of phishing scams and spam, they needed a way to tell legitimate marketing messages, like those advertising a sale at Jcrew.com, from junk. But their endorsement of GoodMail’s system immediately spurred outcry from groups like MoveOn.org, the AFL-CIO, Gun Owners of America and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which formed the coalition Dearaol.com.
AOL said the program would help its customers. When they see the CertifiedEmail symbol on an e-mail purporting to be from PayPal, for example, they can be sure it really is from PayPal, not from online scammers hunting for personal information.
In March, AOL extended a peace offering by announcing a plan to pick up the costs for nonprofit groups that wish to send e-mails to AOL members.
There will be no requirement, ever, for not-for-profits who deliver e-mail to AOL members, to pay for e-mail certification and delivery, AOL postmaster Charles Stiles said.
The fact is, ISPs like AOL commonly make these kinds of arbitrary decisions–silently banning huge swathes of legitimate mail on the flimsiest of reasons–every day, and no one hears about it, said Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. AOL’s planned CertifiedEmail system would let them profit from this power by offering to charge legitimate mailers to bypass these malfunctioning filters.
A business owner in Michigan first discovered the problem and alerted other members of the coalition, who sent test messages to their AOL-using friends and family. Messages without the DearAOL.com link went through. Messages with the link bounced.
The Times independently verified the coalition’s claims with test e-mails to an AOL account.
"The fact of the matter is that AOL’s system is far from perfect, and they do block information," said Timothy Karr, campaign director for Free Press, a national media reform organization involved in DearAOL.com. "Whether it is intentional or not is beside the point. We see this as censorship."
But others said AOL’s critics should be grateful that the recent glitch boosted their cause.
One should not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, said Internet governance professor Jonathan Zittrain of Oxford University. Nonetheless, "to the extent that this campaign was about raising awareness, AOL has contributed greatly to that."
Graham said that AOL has yet to implement the GoodMail system, but plans to do so imminently. When it does adopt the certified mail program, AOL will continue to operate its white lists, or lists of accepted e-mail senders, he said. In addition, the company plans to start a registration system for nonprofits and other groups wishing to send e-mail to subscribers so that they would avoid spam filters.
AOL incident came as Congress mulls over whether to allow telephone and cable companies to charge premium fees to make sure Internet content such as downloadable movies and music are delivered quickly and reliably.