Top > Business > 2006 > February > 2006-02-12

Email Taxes and Internet Toll Booths

Yahoo and AOL mail account users may be seeing some extra charges coming their way in the next few months. The business of email is starting to costs these sites quite a bit of money and they are finding that moving the costs over to the users is their best option. The Service Roundtable, an Internet based alliance of small service businesses, announced that it may be forced to charge AOL and Yahoo users a premium to account for added costs resulting from charges for email delivery recently announced by the two companies.

?Our preference is for a ?Net Neutral? Internet,? said Service Roundtable CEO Matt Michel. ?But if an Internet service provider is going to charge us to communicate with paying subscribers to our service, we have to collect the added charges somewhere". Michel agreed that spam is a problem, but rejected plans by AOL and Yahoo to charge senders up to one penny for each email delivered. He suggested either white listing or the use of more affordable companies like Bonded Sender.

According to Michel, AOL?s plan would cost his small business hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pay no attention to the paternalistic nonsense about protecting users from spam, viruses, and phishing. This is a money grab, pure and simple. It?s an attempt to establish a toll booth on the Internet and impose a private email tax scheme. Refuse to pay and your private communications with your customers will be held hostage.