You don’t have to travel as far as China to find prominent Internet companies engaging in censorship .

AOL has taken to bouncing messages that refer to a petition against its decision to use Goodmail’s email validation service, according to reports in C|News and The Los Angeles Times .

This is the latest twist in a long running saga over AOL’s decision to charge for the assured delivery of email into its customers’ inboxes.

I can scarcely believe the stories are true.

All ethical considerations aside, politically the censorship plays completely into the hands of those who fear, rightly it seems, that the new arrangement will restrict Internet traditions of free speech and communication (among other things).

UPDATE: It seems that the censorship was an unfortunate accident caused by a “software glitch”.AOL, goodmail, email, spam, censorship, free speech, email tax

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Tags: AOL, censorship, email, email tax, free speech, goodmail, spam

This entry was posted on Friday, 14th April, 2006 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Email in general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.