ISPs Go Postal

Saw this one coming. Sez the New York Times:

Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

The Internet companies say that this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users of their services. They also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.

On the face of it, it's hard to really complain too much about this--the postal analogy is quite apt: if you don't want to pay a lot to send something, you can send it an el cheapo way and pray that it arrives. Companies eagerly started using the much more expensive FedEx in the 80s (or maybe even the 70s--it's all a blur at this point) when something "absolutely, positively had to get there overnight." What I find troubling, though, is that this can lead in dangerous directions; the great thing about the Internet is the idea of "data-neutrality" and once big companies can control what data is sent and to whom, then the party's over and it'll be time to go offline.

In the end, though, I guess it's just a shame that all the hackers and spammers and other fracking morons out there in cyberspace had to ruin a great thing for the rest of us. If there is a hell, let's hope its fires await them.