22 Feb, 2006

Dear MoveOn:

Thanks for your great work in the last election. You took a simple idea—that electronic communication could be an effective tool for fast, powerful political action by members of the electorate who might not otherwise participate in the civic process—and you ran with it. I was thrilled to see it take off, and I was glad to see such concerted and thoughtful action come out of it.

Today, I'm sorry to tell you that I don't see that vision at work in your organization. Your recent Stop AOL mailing would appear to be symptomatic of a lack or purpose, a knee-jerk reactive urge misdirected into political petitions, and most of all a plea for attention.

Your depiction of what's at stake in AOL's proposal is inaccurate for several reasons:

• First, AOL's scheme is not a censorship proposal. They do not propose to "misplace" the electronic Christmas letters of hardworking citizens. Behind its thin facade of "guaranteed delivery", this announcement is simply and blantantly a gentleman's agreement to let spammers prey more easily on their customers. I submit that senders of legitimate email (that is, email not flagged by existing spam filters) will suffer only inasmuch as this new spamming channel makes email users yet more reluctant to read their email.
• This policy has been a long time coming. It does not represent a new and outrageous departure from previous policies. If this announcement makes AOL evil, then they have been evil for a long time now. It certainly didn't merit an "emergency" petition. Spam has been with us since before AOL came on the scene.
• While I do strongly believe that network neutrality is an essential principle for a free and open Internet, I respectfully disagree with your implication that AOL's actions will have a necessary chilling effect on democratic discourse. Democracy is not achieved by nit-picking at discriminatory clauses in Terms Of Service, but by building strong public avenues of civic involvement which are strong enough to resist private interest.
• AOL is not a governmental organization, and is not obligated to listen to petitions, even “emergency” petitions such as this one. Calling on high-minded principles may be effective when dealing with organizations that profess interest in high principle (e.g. Congress), but AOL is a business and it speaks the language of money and “target audience” counts. They are a very large email provider, yes, and they excerise several kinds of de facto control over their customers, but at the end of the day they are still a for-profit company who must keep their customers or die. AOL is subject to competition from many, many other service providers and they are fully aware that their customers retain the ability to vote with their feet. This simple, direct economic pressure is the only force which will truly dissuade a mega-corporation from a using a policy: persuade them that they will lose money on it. Were I a member of the AOL Board of Directors, I would cheerfully throw away stacks and stacks of petitions about “level playing fields” and “forces for democracy”, but would take very serious pause from any letter that in the form:

  Dear AOL:
  Your policy of collusion with spammers is unacceptable to me. I now become and will sincerely remain—
  Your former customer.

With these observations, I conclude with regret that MoveOn no longer represents the simple, hard-hitting democratizing ideas which I wish to support, and has achieved the worst kind of reflexive activism, where the proper response for everything is to circulate a petition and then ask for more money. Please think hard about the fact that you have become so purposeless as to resort to spamming me about spam.

I may rejoin your mailing list if and when you regain the capacity for tightly focused, carefully-planned, relevant, action. In the meantime, please don't send me any more emails.

I now become and will sincerely remain—
Your former member, Christopher K. Black.