Email Tax

Boing Boing blogged AOL/Yahoo say: our email tax will make the net as good as the post office!

That bad? Email has already killed Western Union Telegrams, and is making a good shot at eliminating the Post Office (I get more junk mail than I do mail I want each day).

AOL/Yahoo: our email tax will make the net as good as the post office! AOL and Yahoo have proposed a system to charge senders a quarter of a cent for guaranteed delivery on each email sent to their customers. They justify this as an anti-spam measure, but of course it could make them billions, is unlikely to eliminate spam, and will undermine the ability of activist groups like MoveOn and others to correspond with their supporters.

Well if it is going to hurt MoveOn.org maybe there is some good to it.

The justification AOL offers for this is that it could make email just as good as postal mail.

Or perhaps as bad.