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List:       dmca-discuss
Subject:    [DMCA_Discuss] EFF: DearAOL Grows From 50 to 500 Orgs In One Week
From:       Seth Johnson <seth.johnson () realmeasures ! dyndns ! org>
Date:       2006-03-07 16:11:32
Message-ID: 440DB0B4.B8D1C675 () RealMeasures ! dyndns ! org
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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: EFF: DearAOL.com Coalition Grows From 50 Organizations
to 500 InOne Week
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 00:16:56 -0800
From: EFF Press <press@eff.org>
To: presslist@eff.org

Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release

For Immediate Release: Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Contact:

Danny O'Brien
   Activism Coordinator
   Electronic Frontier Foundation
   danny@eff.org
   +1 415 436-9333 x121

DearAOL.com Coalition Grows From 50 Organizations to 500 In
One Week

30,000 Email Users Sign Open Letter

San Francisco - Despite AOL's attempt to divide its
critics, the DearAOL.com Coalition announced Monday it has
grown tenfold from 50 organizations to more than 500 as it
fights AOL's controversial plan to create a two-tiered
Internet that leaves the little guy behind.

Last week, AOL's proposed "email tax" came under fire from
a coalition of political groups on the left and right,
businesses and non-profits, charities, and Internet
advocacy organizations.  More than 400 publications around
the world published articles about AOL's plan to allow
large mass-emailers to pay to bypass AOL's spam filters and
get guaranteed delivery directly into the inboxes of AOL
customers -- leaving the little guy behind with
increasingly unreliable second-tier Internet service.

In just several days, the DearAOL.com Coalition grew to
include everything from babysitting co-ops to pony clubs,
from farmers markets to biker dailies, from Hawaiian
skateboard makers to church groups -- demonstrating that
small, large, ordinary and extraordinary groups depend on
free email delivery. All coalition members are located at
www.dearaol.com.

Clearly worried by the coalition's growing momentum, AOL on
Friday tried to repackage its already existing "Enhanced
Whitelist" as if it were a new program for nonprofits.  It
also tried to divide the coalition with an offer to give
special email privileges to some "qualified" nonprofits
while leaving other non-profits, charities, small
businesses, and even neighbors with community mailing lists
behind.  Neither of these addresses the core of the
problem: AOL's increased financial incentive to downgrade
ordinary email delivery.

"I don't take bribes," said Gilles Frydman, Executive
Director of the Association of Cancer Online Resources, a
free nonprofit online service for cancer patients.  "The
solution is not AOL offering a few of us service for free
in exchange for our silence –- the solution is preserving
equal access to the free and open Internet for everyone."

If anything, the net result of AOL's Friday announcement
was that they conceded the central point of the DearAOL.com
Coalition.

"By offering to move a few of the little guys from the
losers circle to the winners circle, AOL conceded the
broader point of our coalition -- that AOL's would create a
two-tiered Internet that leaves many behind with inferior
service," said Adam Green, a spokesperson for MoveOn.org
Civic Action.

This weekend, the San Jose Mercury News exposed this
reality in an editorial entitled, "Paid e-mail will lead to
separate, unequal systems; free systems will become
neglected." It identified AOL's threat to the "free and
open" Internet this way: "the temptation would be to
neglect the free e-mail system, whose reliability would
decline. Eventually, everyone would migrate to the
fee-based system. There would be no way around the AOL
tollbooth."

"Perversely, AOL's pay-to-send system would actually reward
AOL financially for degrading free email for regular
customers as they attempt to push people into paid-mail,"
said Danny O'Brien, Activism Coordinator for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation. "AOL should be working to ensure its
spam filters don't block legitimate mail, not charging
protection money to bypass those filters and offering
band-aids to allow some select nonprofits to bypass them as
well."

"AOL's pay-to-send scheme threatens the free and open
Internet as we know it," said Timothy Karr, campaign
director of Free Press, a national, nonpartisan media
reform organization. "The Internet needs to be a level
playing field. The flow of online information, innovation
and ideas is not a luxury to be sold off to the highest
bidder."

The DearAOL.com Coalition:
http://www.dearaol.com

San Jose Mercury News editorial:
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/14023726.htm

For this release:
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_03.php#004461

About EFF

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil
liberties organization working to protect rights in the
digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and
challenges industry and government to support free
expression and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported
organization and maintains one of the most linked-to
websites in the world at http://www.eff.org/


     -end-

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