America Online is vowing to carry out its plans to institute fees for mass senders of e-mail, despite protests from groups representing 15 million people that claim the move will stifle communications instead of merely halting spam.
A plan by AOL and Yahoo to charge mass e-mailers a fee for guaranteed delivery of messages to subscribers has run into very vocal opposition from a consortium of nonprofit and public interest groups, including MoveOn.org Civic Action, the AFL-CIO, Gun Owners of America and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
But against a backdrop of phony aid organizations and phishing attacks, every legitimate fundraising group loses when consumers are skeptical of anyone asking…
for money, AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said. The classic example of this came last year in the deadly wake of Hurricane Katrina, when the American Red Cross was desperately seeking donations. The Red Cross found itself competing with a legion of hucksters, he said.
AOL said it was undeterred and planned to offer the service within the next 30 days. "Mark it on your calendars," Graham said.
Graham noted that the aid organization was one of the first to sign up for the new e-mail service.
The controversy is erupting as Internet users try to balance the convenience and speed of e-mail with the ease in which it can be abused by junk mailers and "phishers," criminals who forge messages in an attempt to get sensitive information from unwitting recipients.
Some analysts said that AOL subscribers’ disdain for spam and fraud is likely to outweigh whatever sympathy they would have for those criticizing AOL’s plans.
Right now e-mail providers do a lousy job of keeping unwanted content from users, said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Marquette University and the former general counsel of Epinions.com. Users will be thrilled to see a lot of junk taken out of their inboxes, even at the expense of legitimate messages.
Eli Pariser, MoveOn’s executive director, said paying a fee to AOL could add significant costs to the weekly dispatch his group sends, "hundreds of thousands" of which go to AOL subscribers. During a teleconference with reporters, he stopped short of calling for a boycott of AOL, but said such a move remains a possibility.
Larry Pratt, executive director of the Gun Owners of America, another critic, said his "several thousand members" were prepared to boycott if AOL "pulls the trigger" on the service.
The effectiveness of the campaign against the new service will depend on how AOL subscribers react to it and exactly how it works, analysts said.
The fee, scheduled to take effect in 30 days, is little more than an "e-mail tax" say opponents of the plan. Paying for e-mail will thwart the growth of grassroots organizations and divide mass e-mailers into two groups: elites who can afford to communicate with a mass audience, and those who cannot and are locked out, says Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The big nonprofits are getting the attention here, but this is not really just for them, Cohn said. What about the little guys those are just starting and may not be reaching an audience who wants to hear what they have to say? These are the groups that will lose.
AOL Sues Groups
AOL’s three lawsuits, filed recently in federal court in Alexandria, Va., seeks $18 million.
The suits allege that the 30 phishers, who have not yet been identified by name, violated the 2005 Virginia anti-phishing act, which covers AOL because it is based in Dulles, Va. The suits also cite federal computer fraud law and the Lanham Act, which protects trademarks.
The phishers cited in the suits are accused of sending tens of thousands of e-mails and setting up websites that purportedly were from AOL customer service.
Graham said it was unclear how many members were ensnared, but he said the victims gave up screen names, passwords and financial information. The phishers are believed to be part of a multinational network spanning the United States, Germany and Romania.
Phishing, the term given for setting up fake Web sites in order to trick someone out of passwords and other personal information, is at an all-time high. Graham said it is time for the company to go on the offensive.
We are very much in combat mode around here, he said. Our users have asked us for quite a while for help in determining good e-mail from bad. We have to provide them a mechanism to do this.
These lawsuits follow similar efforts by AOL and other Internet service providers to go after e-mail spam artists and online scammers.
Last March, for example, Microsoft filed 117 federal lawsuits against alleged phishers. AOL has won at least 35 such cases for tens of millions of dollars, according to Graham.
The premium e-mail service, which may cost as much as a penny per e-mail, would not cost consumers anything, AOL said. The portal intends to continue to offer its free e-mail service.
AOL, a unit of Time Warner, contends the system will help it reduce spam because only legitimate senders of mass e-mail are likely to pony up the fee — ranging from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per message. But critics say the system will end up blocking many e-mails from groups that can not afford the fee.