This entire thing wreaks of 1st Amendment violations and unlawful content-neutral restrictions.  The Internet is often the fastest, most efficient, and inexpensive way for various organizations and message-makers to communicate their views and ideas to a larger community.  The Internet tax will make it extremely difficult for these groups to communicate their messages to a wide audience.  

There has got to be some serious 1st Amendment issues here.  

"This entire thing wreaks of 1st Amendment violations and unlawful content-neutral restrictions."

Either you can say it "reeks of", as in "smells bad", or you could say something along the lines of "it will wreak havoc upon the 1st Amendment", but you cannot say "wreaks of 1st Amendment violations". Please keep your homonyms in order!

But yes, this has to violate the 1st Amendment. Even under the bizzare "Money falls under the category of free speech" interpretation, this is out of line.

AOL is a private company, out to make money. If they don't do it this way, they'll do it another way, probably by a general rate increase.

E-mail is great: it has enabled people to communicate in ways that they never could previously. But so much of the internet is either free or underpriced that a lot of businesses (think newspapers) have stuck themselves in the bind of providing their services at below cost prices that we've got to expect companies to try and make more money than they have been.

And no, this isn't a freedom of speech issue: freedom of speech applies to the government restricting or allowing speech; it has nothing to do with private companies.

The DearAOL group is not "bi-partisan."  It is "non-partisan."

This is important for a couple reasons.  The first is that bi-partisan is still partisan and this is not an issue that either major party would quibble over.

The second is that by calling a collection like this "bi-partisan" you put them all under the umbrella of the two major parties, and wholly discount the rest of the political world.  

Too often "bi-partisan" is used to mean "non-partisan" and that should change.

Sorry for taking up the time with my pet peeve.

Seriously...what I had heard of this proposal up until this point was that it is a spam-fighting measure that is intended to finally block, once and for all, unsolicited commercial emails while allowing legitimate emails to get through.  Commercial sites like Amazon and Ebay would also pay the fee per email to get through AOL's spam filters, and this would have the effect of cutting back the number of unsolicited emails the legit commercial outfits send.  It would also most certainly cut back on the use of unsolicited emails for political fundraising, which I find to be a big annoyance even when they come from Democratic candidates (as an aside, when I have left an email address on a campaign website asking for people to volunteer for the campaign and the only response I get is frequent spam emails asking for money money money, my usual response is to change my mind and decide that the candidate in question is not really worth actively supporting.)  I'm not sure which way I feel about this particular proposal.  But in general, I would be supportive of most steps which would curtail or ban spam outright.

I am very disappointed to see Democratic groups and candidates increasingly relying on the use of spam emails for political organizing and fundraising.  Spam email, junk mail, billboards, and streets sprouting hundreds of political campaign signs like poison mushrooms every election, are not consistent with my idea of what a sustainable society would look like.  Surely there's a better way.

I don't think you understand what this AOL email tax is.  They are charging senders of email that would otherwise be filtered as spam to go to inboxes instead.  The idea is that advertisers will pay the extra fee rather than dumping large amounts of email that will just end up being blocked anyways.

Dem groups should not be affected by this if their emails are not labelled as spam.

For an unbiased report on this issue:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/ emailtax.asp

Just 2 points from the article...
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* E-mail senders who opt not to pay the surcharge will not be prevented from sending messages to AOL and Yahoo subscribers. Their messages will simply continue to pass through the same spam filters both AOL and Yahoo have had in place for years.

* The notion that non-commercial or non-profit on-line groups will be priced out of existence by being required to "pay thousands of dollars for every email message sent" is unfounded. Nobody is proposing that such groups' messages be blocked, or that they be handled any differently that they are now. Yes, such messages will have to get past spam filters before they're delivered, but that's already the case, and it has been for a long time.
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