C'mon people, Stand up on your own two hind legs...

I sometimes cringe at the actions of my fellow travelers on the path of Liberalism. To wit, I received this letter from Moveon.org this week:

Dear MoveOn member,
The very existence of online civic participation and the free Internet as we know it are under attack by America Online.
AOL recently announced what amounts to an "email tax." Under this pay-to-send system, large emailers willing to pay an "email tax" can bypass spam filters and get guaranteed access to people's inboxes—with their messages having a preferential high-priority designation.
Charities, small businesses, civic organizing groups, and even families with mailing lists will inevitably be left with inferior Internet service unless they are willing to pay the "email tax" to AOL. We need to stop AOL immediately so other email hosts know that following AOL's lead would be a mistake.
Can you sign this emergency petition to America Online and forward it to your friends?

Sign a petition? Jesus! If I were running AOL, I'd wet my pants from laughing so hard. No, a petition is not what is needed. What is needed is a mass exodus from AOL.

I mean, right now, this won't bother me at all because I don't have an AOL account. However, if my current email provider started to do this, I would simply abandon that e-mail address. (Actually, I have 3 addresses at my ISP plus 4 more out on the web (Opera, Yahoo, ICQ and Google) all of which are free. And, even if all of these jumped on the AOL bandwagon, I still have another alternative: namely my own domain and email address. In other words, if AOL's subscribers are pissed about this, then they can send their own message by voting with their feet. Now, personally, if AOL is your ISP, I'd just stop using their mailbox. Tell your friends and family that you've moved to Yahoo or Google, and then simply ignore your AOL address. Let that mailbox fill with spam from AOL's paid spammers. If enough people did that, AOL would notice, sooner or later, that their storage servers were filling up with unopened mail. And, hopefully, their paid email customers would notice that all this email wasn't bringing in any business.

Now, because I have never used the software provided by an ISP to manage my Internet experience, I'm not 100% certain that you can turn off things like email. (I like the option of having my own choice of Internet software -- browser, email client, anti-virus etc., etc. -- so I have never used the software provided by an ISP, and my current plan is never to use that stuff in the future.) I do know that if you use Outlook or Eudora or Mozilla's email client or any of the other email clients out there, you can pick and chose which mailboxes you open and which ones you ignore. My Eudora client will let me pick and chose. Or you can use one of the web based email services (ICQ or Yahoo come to mind) and do all your emailing through your browser. It is not hard.

Personally, I think this is a really bad idea from AOL and I hope they do implement it. Then I hope that their huge customer base melts away like the arctic ice cap is doing. I further hope that a surge in AOL defections will breath some life into the independent ISP industry. I like the idea that there could be 10 small, local ISPs competing for my business. I would love to see AOL, MSN, Verizon (and the other Baby Bells) and the cable companies have serious competition from small independents. That way the cost to the consumer will be kept down and, more importantly, there won't be any 800 pound gorillas capable of forcing things like paid email on us. I want the Internet to be as open and unregulated as possible. And one way of ensuring this is to make sure that no one entity has too much power.

So, if you are an AOL customer and you don't want paid advertisements cluttering up your email inbox, then vote with your feet and move your lazy butt to another email provider or (even better)another ISP entirely. And, if you do consider another ISP, look at local independent suppliers first.