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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