COLORADO ARTS CONNECTION

COLORADO ARTS CONNECTION

Colorado Arts news - Part 1 of 2

Edited Artsjournal world arts news - Part 2 of 2

Send your ideas and copy for the next CAC Arts News to Editor and

Publisher Paul Saunders at artsnews@lpbroadband.net

THANKS!

( This newsletter is no longer affiliated with the Colorado Arts Consortium. Paul Saunders )

IMPORTANT NOTICE:

The following news item is from this (02/06/06) Monday's C/Net. http://news.com.com/Postage+is+due+for+companies+sending+e-mail/2100-1038_3-6035276.html?tag=nefd.top

What it means to you is to be seen. I will send the CAC Arts News as usual and If I get bounce backs or notices from you that the newsletter is considered spam, I will then delete your address from the list. I will not pay to have it delivered. No one is paying me for my time and if the list of addresses dwindle to a small group I will have to decide whether it is worth four or five hours a week to keep it up.

Paul Saunders

Editor

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a controversial system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

The Internet companies say that this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users of their services. The two companies also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.

AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users' main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a special bulk e-mail box or strip them of images and Web links.

Yahoo and AOL say the new system is a way to restore some order to e-mail, which, because of spam and worries about online scams, has become an increasingly unreliable way for companies to reach their customers, even as online transactions are becoming a crucial part of their businesses.

"The last time I checked, the postal service has a very similar system to provide different options," said Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesman. He pointed to services like certified mail with return receipts, "where you really do get assurance that if what you send is important to you, it will be delivered, and delivered in a way that is different from other mail."

But critics of the plan say that the companies risk alienating both their users and the companies that send e-mail. The system will apply not only to mass mailings but also to individual messages like order confirmations from online stores and customized low-fare notices from airlines.

"AOL users will become dissatisfied when they don't receive the e-mail that they want, and when they complain to the senders, they'll be told, 'it's AOL's fault,' " said Richi Jennings, an analyst at Ferris Research, which specializes in e-mail.

As for companies that send e-mail, "some will pay, but others will object to being held to ransom," he said. "A big danger is that one of them will be big enough to encourage AOL users to use a different e-mail service."

In a broader sense, the move to create what is essentially a preferred class of e-mail is a major change in the economics of the Internet. Until now, senders and recipients of e-mail--and, for that matter, Web pages and other information--each covered their own costs of using the network, with no money changing hands. That model is different from, say, the telephone system, in which the company whose customer places a call pays a fee to the company whose customer receives it.

The prospect of a multi-tiered Internet has received a lot of attention recently after executives of several large telecommunications companies, including BellSouth and AT&T, suggested that they should be paid not only by the subscribers to their Internet services but also by companies that send large files to those subscribers, including music and video clips. Those files would then be given priority over other data, a change from the Internet's basic architecture which treats all data in the same way.

This Tuesday, the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing to consider legislation for what has been called Net neutrality--effectively banning Internet access companies from giving preferred status to certain providers of content. The concern is that companies that do not pay could find it hard to reach customers or potential customers, threatening the openness of the Internet.

AOL and its parent, Time Warner, which also owns a large cable system offering high-speed Internet access, have not taken a public stand on the principle of Net neutrality. Neither has Yahoo, which has close relationships with AT& and Verizon. The issue of e-mail postage has not yet come up in the debate over Net neutrality. In the next two months, AOL will start accepting e-mail processed by Goodmail Systems, a company in Mountain View, Calif., that will collect the electronic postage and verify the identity of the sender. Goodmail has tested the system with the participation of a few companies, including the American Red Cross and The New York Times.

Paying senders will be assured that their messages will be delivered to AOL users' main in-boxes and marked as "AOL Certified E-Mail." Unpaid messages will be subject to AOL's spam-filtering process, which diverts suspicious messages to a special spam folder. Most of these messages will also not be displayed with their original images and links. Users will be able to specify that unpaid messages from a particular person or company should never be treated as spam, as they can do now.

Yahoo will start trying out Goodmail's system in coming months, but it has not decided how paid mail will be differentiated from unpaid, said Brad Garlinghouse, vice president