February 06, 2006

Goose and Gander

Only a couple of days back I once more wrote that charging a premium for click-to-call is feasible only if the service provider artificially injects itself in the end-to-end flow. Yesterday, it was reported in NYT that AOL and Yahoo are planning to offer a tiered email delivery service. In a nutshell, those that pay extra will have their emails bypass spam filters and will be delivered with a “stamp of approval”. This is a change in the service model and hence needs a closer scrutiny.

Ostensibly, this will reduce the spam problem. But for practical reasons, if not anything else, they will continue to accept other emails as well, except they will be processed by spam filters. This means that there is not going to be any reduction in spam; indeed it will only increase from the users’ perspective because each user will consider at least some of the “approved” emails to be spam. So the real reason must be revenue enhancement. Tom Evslin suggests that if anybody, it is the recipient who should be compensated and that there are mechanisms in place for that.

This proposal from AOL/Yahoo is “evil” because it breaks the end-to-end argument. One of the first casualties is the long-tail phenomenon, which should be THE celebrated cause in Web 2.0. In some respect, insertion of mail server broke the end-to-end principle; but it was voluntarily done by the user. Even spam filtering was at the behest of the user. But this one looks like an unilateral move. Both Tom and Richi Jennings (in the NYT story) suggest that users can walk away from such providers. It sure looks like one more example of Netheads behaving like Bellheads. A nethead will loath to break the end-to-end principle.

In any event, we do not have to worry much. Given always-on connection and plenty of choices to have presence in the public internet with plenty of storage, there is no need for dedicated email servers anyway.

Posted by aswath at February 6, 2006 01:37 PM
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