MoveOn.org Petitioning to Stop AOL's "Email Tax"

[sugapablo]

MoveOn.org has taken up a petition and circulated it to each of its claimed 3.3 million members, trying to put pressure on America Online to stop its plan to charge senders for incoming email.

Their feeling is that "The Internet is a force for democracy and economic innovation only because it is open to all Internet users equally--we must not let it become an unlevel playing field."

Did MoveOn finally choose a cause all Americans can get behind?

[Billy Ruffian]

1. AOL is backing down quite a bit

This was causing me, and a few friends that administer an ad-hoc, self funded mailing list and server a bit of worry. If it happened, we would have kicked all AOL members off.

AOL is now amending their stance, with stuff to the effect that the charge would be optional, and would give commercial mailers an opportunity to end up with an AOL Approved stamp on an email.

[sugapablo]

3. What about...

What about people like me who use their own mail server and not that of their ISP? Would the give ME a "stamp"?

Probably not!

There's lots of people like me with in-home servers or shared hosting servers out there that need to send mail as well.

[eggman67]

2. Probably not.

Because most Americans aren't going to give a shit about this.