LOS ANGELES TIMES (4/14/06): AOL Blocks Critics' E-Mails
By Chris Gaither and Joseph Menn, Times Staff Writers
April 14, 2006
It's never been easy to win a fight against people who buy ink by the barrel. The same may be true about those who buy bandwidth by the terabit - as a coalition fighting Internet giant AOL discovered Thursday.
A group of 600 organizations that includes the AFL-CIO and the Gun Owners of America has been circulating an online petition protesting AOL's plans to begin charging extra to route e-mail around its spam filters.
On Thursday, though, the world's biggest Internet service provider blocked e-mails containing links to the petition against the "CertifiedEmail" plan at DearAOL.com.
AOL called it a simple technical glitch and fixed the problem by midafternoon. The company's critics denounced the blocking as censorship and said it supported their belief that Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and other Internet service providers manage e-mail haphazardly.
Either way, the incident illustrates the delicate balance between democracy and Internet gate-keeping. How do Internet service providers clamp down on spammers without hampering the grass-roots campaigns taking advantage of the medium's openness? And who hasn't had e-mail to a friend bounced back as spam?
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Posted by: serega on March 14, 2008 19:36
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Posted by: serega on March 15, 2008 14:01