Net Neutrality

“AOL and Yahoo believe this will help them identify legitimate email and lessen the risk of ‘malmail,’” said Jonathan Spira, chief analyst at Basex, an IT research firm specializing in knowledge sharing and collaboration. “It gives the companies that pay a ‘do not stop, go straight to the inbox’ filter.”

He sees a certain logic in its resemblance to the regular postal system, where the sender, not the recipient, pays, and senders pay more for certified delivery than for regular first-class mail.

It also fits into the concept of the tiered Internet system. Some Internet service providers such as AT&T, BellSouth, and Verizon Communications have recently been calling for services that require heavy amounts of bandwidth to pay them to use their pipes (see Telcos Propose Web Tiers).

“That differs from the basic architecture of the Internet from its inception, which treats all data in the same way,” said Mr. Spira. “Depending on your catbird seat, this type of tiered payment structure does threaten the neutrality and the openness of the Net.”

The Senate Commerce Committee plans to begin hearings Tuesday on legislation calling for so-called “Net neutrality” that would prevent Internet service providers from prioritizing their traffic in this way.

Whether or not they will want to extend Net neutrality to email service providers is debatable, since Congress has also passed laws such as the CAN-SPAM Act to punish senders of spam messages, and that is what AOL and Yahoo claim they will be able to do with the CertifiedEmail service.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has also called for charging email senders as a way to cut down on the volume of spam email, but his proposal did not attract much support. AOL claims to have reduced spam email by more than 85 percent since 2003, so spam control apparently isn’t the only consideration for moving to charge for email delivery.