Bringing the danger of all this into relief, some companies take short-cuts that effectively stop communications -- "spam" or not. AOL routinely blocks, hinders or delays emails with the same content sent to more than a threshold number of AOL subscribers. Many Internet workers think the "threshold" is about 50 to 100. AOL isn't saying. But the interference occurs and it makes no difference if these people have signed on to the email list or not.
In general, short-cut or not, if you are a subscriber of a major commercial provider, there is a good possibility you're not receiving all the legitimate email being sent you, including messages from a list to which you've subscribed.
You'll never know it unless you notice something wrong: they don't tell you that they've hijacked your email. The people who sent it to you won't be informed. They don't tell the provider either. THAT I know from personal experience. We find out if someone tells us that recipients of their email are mysteriously not receiving it. Then we inquire with the provider of that recipient and, to remove the "block, we must engage in a Kafkaesque process that consumes time and energy and must often be repeated periodically.
All of the major, successful Internet campaigns run by progressive activists (from impeachment to health care to anti-war to Katrina) use unsolicited email. How could it be otherwise? How in the world do you communicate with people to get them information they don't have if you only email to people who've told you they want it? We could never build a campaign or expand it that way.
Our traditional tools have always included leaflets in the mail, flyers handed out, public speeches, phone calls and now this powerful Internet. We've been able to use those tools because, for a century, we have fought tooth and nail to protect and expand our constitutional right to protected speech.
Sure, unwanted email can be a pain. The same is true of bulk postal mail, leaflets activists shove in your face during a rally and the insistence of street organizers that they have a message you should spend minutes of your valuable time listening to.
But few of us would ask the post office to stop any of our mail or ask the police to arrest a street organizer. We understand that, in the end, these inconvenient "incursions" benefit us all and sometimes give us information we need. We also understand that repression of these activities would create a far greater problem than the one it solves.
And there's little question that it will get worse because our movements are making major headway using the Internet and we're mailing to many more people than ever before. This automatically means greater monitoring, a higher incidence of unprovoked blocking and more complaints.
What's most painfully ironic about this commercial response to "spam" is that it punishes us for something someone else is doing. Our movements don't email to large lists we know nothing about. We can't afford it and we don't organize that way. Movement bulk email is sent to carefully developed lists, usually shared organization to organization, based on recipients' demonstrated interest in the issue we're emailing about.
That's not "spam" by any reasonable definition...except the commercial providers'.
What's the answer to spam? Even those of us careful to balance the real need to protect people against unwanted bulk email and to protect free speech in the process haven't come up with a solution. That's going to require a full public discussion of the issue that goes beyond the industry boundaries.
The commercial Internet is not going to come up with the right solution unless the people who use the Internet force it to and the first step in that process is for our movement to enter the debate, force it beyond the limited term "spam" and make the protection of our communications and organizing as high a point on the agenda as the protection of people's email in-boxes.
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Alfredo Lopez is a Co-Director of May First/People Link -- http://www.mayfirst.org
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