E-mail, fees, and the value of something for nothing
This week's highlighted research:
Forrester Research. "Email postage: Here at last."
Jupiter Research. "US E-mail marketing forecast, 2005-2010."
The Internet, since its inception, has been subject of enormous debate, and early on, armchair academics were quite fond of saying "the Internet wants to be free." This dubious phrase gave rise to a few good ideas and several bad ones, but the fact remains that the promise of profits is what has chiefly driven the advancement of the Internet.
The Internet has taken on a character of its own, and when people talk about "the spirit of the Internet," they usually are talking about its value as a low-cost and/or free medium for communications, where the predominant business model is to offer something of value at no cost before taking any profit, as a sort of offering to the Internet god. The business school guys never thought much of this, but it seems to have worked for the most part. Witness Google: When a casual user thinks of Google, they think of the enormously popular free search engine, which has without a doubt changed the way the world approaches online research. Who would have ever thought that somebody would create such a powerful search portal that would allow you to search the entire Internet, and for free? But, Google didn't get to where it is today by being benevolent; it's the promise of profit that has driven this powerhouse and dozens of others like it to innovate and create new tools for us to use while we're surfing the Web.
It is this mysterious spirit of the Internet that causes a substantial ruckus any time the Internet god asks us, the common everyday users, to pony up a few dollars. And this ruckus is in fact a good thing, it keeps runaway prices in check, and forces Internet companies to think up creative new ways to give us something for nothing, or at least for very low cost, while still making money for themselves.
The latest ruckus was caused by AOL and Yahoo!, who recently decided to make a deal with a company called Goodmail to levy a fee against those who want to send bulk e-mails. Those who give homage to the "spirit of the Internet" face a dilemma: on one hand, they don't like it when Internet users have to pay. On the other, they don't want commercial e-mail to flourish. The scary part isn't the immediate deal between AOL, Yahoo! and Goodmail; but what the potential might be for the future of the Internet. Will levying a fee against bulk e-mailers eventually lead to ISPs levying a fee against ordinary folks who just use e-mail as part of their daily social and work life? It's a legitimate fear, but in the present context, a bit of a slippery slope. I certainly don't want to have to pay for every e-mail I send. But that's not what the AOL/Yahoo!/Goodmail triad has in mind, and I'm fairly confident that ISPs know darn well they could never get away with it. Mind you, they probably would if they could, but the "spirit of the Internet" would come back to haunt them if they tried.
Forrester's report describes Goodmail's whitelisting service and how AOL plans to use it, pointing out that imposing such a levy is in reality the only way to curb spam. Forrester goes a step beyond individual ISP-based payment systems, encouraging other ISPs to create a single architecture to standardize email postage. To be clear, nobody is talking about levying a fee on individual e-mails here. The system is designed to separate spam into two categories; good spam and bad spam, with the good spam being commercial e-mails sent by individuals and companies who have complied with a predetermined set of standards (and who have paid the requisite fees).
Jupiter Research cites some interesting statistics about the spam battle however, stating that e-mail marketing spending will grow to $1.1 billion by 2010, but during the same period, spam messages will decrease by 13 percent. Predicting a more organized e-mail marketing arena, Jupiter notes that more ISPs are taking steps to improve spam filtering, but warns against erroneously marking permission-based e-mails as spam. IDC looks at e-mail usage, and accurately states that the future of e-mail depends on keeping its value high and cost low.
Sure, spam is annoying. But we must remain vigilant against allowing fee-based e-mail systems like this to embark on the slippery slope towards a universal e-mail tax; and beyond that, we must always be careful when somebody sets themselves up as an authority over our ability to communicate, even if it is authority over the much-maligned commercial e-mail marketer. There is risk of it becoming nothing more than a shakedown, where the authority, whoever that winds up being, says "pay us money and you can display our seal of approval."
ITworld.com
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