Big entities just keeping mucking around with the internet. This time it's AOL, which has proposed charging senders a fraction of a cent per email to reign in costs and increase revenues. This scheme uses a service from Goodmail Systems, which authenticates email through a small per email fee. Creating a two-tiered internet, where groups have to pay-to-send email, has provoked a response from such email dependent groups as Rightmarch, The American Academy of HIV Medicine, The Association of Cancer Online Resources, and Moveon. Other groups joining the nonpartisan coalition include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Working Assets, Common Cause, Craig Newmark (from Craigslist), and a range of others encompassing technology providers, consultants, nonprofits, and political groups.

Here's the gist of what AOL's proposing:

CertifiedEmail is a pay-to-send system that allows mass-emailers to pay AOL the equivalent of an "email tax" to bypass AOL's spam filters and get guaranteed delivery to the inboxes of AOL customers. This is appealing to some email senders who don't want to risk their emails being classified as spam. CertifiedEmail will also be displayed in AOL inboxes with a small "trusted" symbol, and it will leave intact links and images that may be weeded out of non-paid emails.

To send CertifiedEmail, mailers would pay AOL and Goodmail an estimated 1/4 of a cent to a penny for every message sent to every email address on the mailing list-equaling thousands of dollars for email messages sent to large lists.

This coalition has produced DearAOL.coman open letter style-site similar to the Online Coalition which formed to educate the FEC on the rights of bloggers.

Goodmail Systems has fought back (even pointing to a Snopes page 'debunking' the email tax language. Goodmail claims that this system will simply help senders get mail through more reliably and easily. Apparently, it doesn't prevent spam, and isn't supposed to. And there's no evidence that AOL plans to prevent normal email from getting through to invox. It's just extra-reliable certification for big companies that want a warm and fuzzy feeling, secure in the knowledge that their email is reaching their customers. In no way is it a licensing scheme to help AOL make billions of dollars taxing the senders of email.