OT: Delivery Conf. to your customers? Not.

Coursedesign wrote on 2/5/2006, 11:05 AM
New York Times has an article today about AOL and Yahoo starting to charge commercial senders a fee of 1/4 to 1 cent per e-mail to bypass their spam filters.

This is said to affect not just bulk mailers who get an effective way around the improving spam filters, but also any vendor, selling for example videos, who wants to send a delivery confirmation or shipping notification to a customer after purchase.

Of course, if you're lucky, you'll get them through for free anyway. Unless AOL or Yahoo comes up short in their quarterly revenues, in which case the "spam" filters may be modified to remove all message with any variation of "order confirmation", etc., unless paid for.

In other news today (mentioned in the same article), 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.

"So you have SBC DSL but want to use Vonage for your phone needs? So sorry, they haven't paid their protection money this month, so we had to turn them off. But we have the same service for only 50% more, just call 1-800-EAT-STUFF."

There are rumors that Google is buying up dark fiber (unused optical fiber capacity, which is plentiful thanks to more efficient technology) across the country, in order to be able to "bypass" The Phone Company, with Wi-Fi or Wireless MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) for access points.

"Bypass" is how Microwave Communications Inc. got started. They started the modern telecommunications revolution by offering companies a way around the very high priced Phone Company monopoly.

Later they changed their name to MCI, were successful for a long time, but finally bought by The Phone Company (a part of same old Bell Company currently known as Verizon).

Let's hope Google can hold out at least as long as MCI. That will require outbidding The Phone Company in purchasing more politicians, but that should be easy for those who know K Street in D.C.

In unrelated news, it was stated in today's L.A. Times that of the 2 million new jobs credited to President Bush's massively deficit-fueling tax cuts, 2.8 million were government jobs...

The government of course doesn't increase hiring based on "its owners' income tax cuts", so it seems that the result of Bush's gargantuan deficit increase is a net loss of 800,000 jobs.

This was contrasted against the previous President's policies that, if one used the same measure of success, were all a cause of the 18 million new jobs created during his first six years.

Ya'll have a nice day now, and enjoy the Super Bowl Commercials!

Comments

beerandchips wrote on 2/5/2006, 12:31 PM
Aside from this being a Bush bash. What the hell does this have to do with Vegas?
jrazz wrote on 2/5/2006, 12:47 PM
It has nothing to do with Vegas, but it does have a lot to do with its users; especially those who sell DVD's produced in Vegas/DVDA and sell them over the internet. The first part of the post deals with confirmations and could possibly jeopardizes a mode by which to notify customers that their request was recieved and we indeed did get the information along with your payment.

I find threads like this helpful in that they inform us, the users, who is doing what and possibly, who we should stay away from or let it be known to that provider that we are not going to put up with that and therefore we will find different providers, etc.

j razz
TheHappyFriar wrote on 2/5/2006, 6:10 PM
doesn't seem much like bush bashing to me (don't know the point... everyone bash's the guy in charge!).

That phone/net crap sucks though. Even though I thought that Powell's stance on TV/Radio wasn't that great when he was in charge of the FCC he DID try to keep the newer telecommunications as un-regulated as possible so they could expand. :/
p@mast3rs wrote on 2/5/2006, 7:16 PM
Wow, wonder how they would collect from Bit Torrent users? LOL. To hell with Ma Bell and her monopolies.
John_Cline wrote on 2/5/2006, 9:36 PM
To hell with Ma Bell and her monopolies

There hasn't been a "Ma Bell" in years.
farss wrote on 2/5/2006, 9:38 PM
Have I got this right, they want 1 cent per email and we think this is a problem?
If your business model can't stand that cost hike you're in serious trouble. If on the other hand it sends the spammers broke cause at 1 cent per email 1 million of them starts to cost big time then I for one will be way ahead given the cost of my time dealing with spam versus the 1 cent per email that I send.
Bob.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 2/6/2006, 6:17 AM
i'd say the problem is what's considered "spam." I sent an e-mail about my newborn to 40 people & it's considered spam by some filters. That mean I pay 40 cents? That's what sucks.

But I wouldn't worry about yahoo & such charing for e-mail... there'll always be free ones out there. It's the phone companies & cable companies being able to charge. As far as I know, that mean's they'd need to knw what you're sending which means they'd need to read your data. :(
John_Cline wrote on 2/6/2006, 7:02 AM
That mean I pay 40 cents? That's what sucks

Well, if you sent a standard postal mail to one person, it costs 39 cents. So, you can send it to 40 people for 1 cent more.

Hey, if this potential new wrinkle in the cost of e-mail stops, or greatly reduces, spam, then I'm all for it.

John

Coursedesign wrote on 2/6/2006, 7:44 AM
John,

So you feel confident that if you pay the blackmailer the $X he is asking for, he won't come back next month and ask for $5X, and the month after that come back and ask for $10X, and so on, whenever he needs a profit boost for a bad quarter, or just to create the illusion of a growing business?

As suggested earlier in this thread, there are options. I can tell the customers that if they want delivery confirmations when they buy from me, all they have to do is change e-mail providers and tell all their friends that they have a new address.

My hope then would be that I'm not labeled as a bad supplier by prospective customers, "because the other vendors have paid protection money so they can send e-mail, that's more convenient for me as a customer, I'll just buy from them instead."

Nobody has to pay to send family e-mail to AOL or Yahoo. Unless of course, those companies, or any of those that pick up on the great business idea, have a bad quarter and are about to be pummeled on Wall Street. Then they could make the spam filters "more strict", so that anybody who wants to be sure to get through has to pay the "Special Mail Delivery" bypass fee.

Microsoft has been wanting for the last ten years to insert themselves into the internet as a gatekeeper, charging a fee per item, where the item is anything that moves. So far, they got clobbered each time they tried it, perhaps because they were perceived as arrogant.

Will people be as observant this time around with cute little AOL and Yahoo?

Don't bank on it.

I for one don't want to have to pay Verizon for every e-mail I send on my Business DSL, plus then pay again for that e-mail to get actually delivered to an AOL or Yahoo address. Next there will be "long distance fees" for the transmission of that same e-mail, and soon enough we'll be paying 39 cents per e-mail in the name of progress (commercial progress this time around, not technical progress).

This a very slippery slope.


TheHappyFriar wrote on 2/6/2006, 11:52 AM
let's not forget that thanks to EULA's net companies aren't even responsible for the quality of their services. I could pay for an e-mail & it gets lost in the internet or delayed! At least with the postoffice & my overnight is delayed I get my money back.
Coursedesign wrote on 2/6/2006, 1:36 PM
Right!

This is not like the postal service.

It is more like the banks, were for centuries they made a good living off the spread between deposit interest and loan interest, for example paying you 1% on your checking account and charging you 20% on your credit cards.

Then suddenly banks became greedy. They saw that they could double and quadruple their profits by milking both the interest rate spread and additional monthly fees for your checking account, for your credit cards, for entering a bank office, for using an ATM, for late payments, for overlimit charges, for online payments, for transfers, even for foreign currency conversions even though you already paid a percentage over what they pay for the conversion, etc., etc.

Now let's see this happen to the internet.

Soon enough you'll receive a monthly bill from your ISP that looks like this:

Monthly Account Fee = $22.50
Billing Fee: $4.95
Payment Processing Fee, On Time: $2.95
Monthly RSS Gateway Fee: $10.00
VOIP Gateway Access Fee to reach your Vonage service = $13.95
Web Access Fee: 1,272 pages @$0.01 ea. = $12.72
Received E-mails Fee: 322 e-mails @$0.02 ea. = $8.05
Sent E-mails Fee: 112 E-mails @$0.08 = $8.96
MP3 Gateway Fee: 15 downloads @$0.99 each (excl. provider charges) = $14.85
WMV Video Gateway Fee: 12 downloads @$0.60 each = $7.20
Consumed Bandwidth Fee: 1,347 MB @$0.01 = $13.47

Total: $79.20

10% Federal Tax on above: $7.92
14% State Tax on above: $22.18
8% City Tax on above: $6.34
3.6% Government FUSF Fee on above: $7.01

Total: $122.65

Please pay promptly by online ($2.95 fee) or by check in the mail ($4.95 fee).

Note to customer: If you think this is expensive, we also have dial-up at $14.95/month (+ $36.50 in fees). Or you can go somewhere else, bwahahaha!

Deathstar logo - "Customer service (from India) with a smile."
Our customer service representatives have the very finest training that can be fit into four hours. Their goal is to help you in that time on the phone or less.

P.S. Our CEO just passed away in his 50,000 sq.ft. mansion from eating too much goose liver and drinking too much Dom Perignon champagne, we are looking for a replacement and will be offering a $100M sign-up bonus that will be added to next month's bills.

Of course our elected representatives could stop this, but would you do that if you got hundreds of millions of dollars from the Baby Bells every campaign? I don't think so. Vote Repucrat, the best party money can buy(TM)!

This leaves customers voting with their pocket books.

For once I'm a pessimist and think that our Internet access bills will soon look like our cable bills (I canceled my cable bill years ago, but from what I can see nothing has changed except more fees and higher rates every year).

I'll have to watch some free, non-recompressed OTA 1920x1080 HD tonight, this walletosis is getting to me.

farss wrote on 2/6/2006, 2:25 PM
Actually it's very much like the postal service, the banks, and the telcos. Technology has made changes to all those services, they're now all very much subject to Grey's Law.
Just take the banks, used to be a time when a bank was just a local entity, you loaned them money and they loaned it out to local businesses. Probably that's truer in the USA than down here where our banks were pretty much all national from the beginning but still the same changes have occured. Today I'm hard pressed to remember what branch holds my accounts, with Internet banking it really doesn't matter, I can shift money between any of my accounts and any bank anywhere on the planet in the click of a mouse. I used to know my bank manager on a first name basis, today there's no bank managers, if I need a loan that too is just a mouse click.
So all the banks are providing is conduits for money to flow through, the more accounts I can access through my local conduit the more value those conduits have, the more they'll get used.
So the banks had to change their business model, there's no certainty that I'll leave my millions in accounts with them, if a bank in the Caymans or Saudi is offering more interest overnight than my local bank then Click, they loose my money overnight.
Now I don't have millions to make the above worthwhile but you can bet it's only a matter of time before you will not need millions to do just this, the banks know it's coming, they know their old business models are on shaky ground.
Now look at the postal service, at the moment delivery of letters is free, you only pay to send a letter. Send one from New York to Sydney and Oz Post doesn't get a nickel, same in reverse. Except the junk mailers have taken advantage of this, now they send a container load of Oz mail to New Zealand and post it from there to Oz because they charge less to post a letter.
I remember not so long ago questioning why the spammers keep going and the simple answer is, it costs next to nothing to send a million emails. True enough. But the conduits that they flow through cost money, they were funded by a variety of enterprises in many different countries and somehow they have to get a ROI. Not so long ago most of those providing that could offset those costs with the profits made from their POTS but VoIP is fast eating into that.
We are fast approaching a true global village, money, information, media, just about everything will flow seamlessly through bits of fibre, just how that all gets paid for is going to involve quite a bit of gnashing of teeth. Making certain it doesn't get clogged up with garbage will be another pressing issue.
Bob.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 2/6/2006, 2:59 PM
i wouldn't say we're approaching a "global village" yet... 6 years ago I was told by people who "knew" the computer industry that we'd all have broadband 3 years ago. Still waiting. Best I get is a 26.9 connection that crapps out half the time.

But that's in the US. Major disadvantage here is that 40/50/60 years ago when we were on the forefront of tech we got on it. Now noone wants to replace it. :( And the size things is kinda hard to deal with.... Many EU countries are the size of states in the US or provinces in Canada, except they don't need to deal with all the political hoopla of other states (the EU seems to be the solution though.... make all of Europe kinda like one big country... kinda like the US a hundred fifty years ago).

Sigh.... Oh well. :) Gas prices haven't really effected me because I heat with wood, not oil/gas/propain. Eventuatly I'll just ditch my phone too. :)
Coursedesign wrote on 2/6/2006, 3:02 PM
Bob,

Clearly spam is an issue, but the moment you allow greedy vendors to start charging even one thousandth of a cent per e-mail, you will soon see regular increases every few months until you have reached your absolute pain threshold, say around US$100 per month per household in many cases.

It seems to me better to allow each e-mail account holder to decide if they want to be able to receive international e-mail, and if so from which countries.

This combined with effective enforcement of fines and fast local shutdown of spamming domains should cut out the spam quite a bit.

And Bob, here we are still living with a socialized postal service, and they don't have these ideas yet. In the future we'll probably see here what has already happened in true capitalist countries like Sweden, where I understand they have closed all post offices and replaced them with package delivery through grocery stores, etc. (much like bank branches in supermarkets in the U.S.).

For the moment, there is too much of a socialist mindset here for this to happen. :O)

fldave wrote on 2/6/2006, 6:53 PM
"There hasn't been a "Ma Bell" in years."

Like this year, mostly. Over a third of the way there. Look for more buyouts.

Southwestern Bell (SBC) bought Pactel and Ameritech (both Baby Bells) back in the late 90s. SBC just bought ATT the past year. Kept ATT name and ticker symbol "T".

"Of the 24 Bell Operating Companies in which AT&T owned or held a minority interest prior to 1984, nine are now a part of the "new" AT&T'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT&T

Sorry for all of the Wikipedia links lately. Wiki's cool
Jay Gladwell wrote on 2/7/2006, 4:34 AM

<sigh>

Yes, and with the inclusion of all these other taxes (and that's all they really are) it has raised our overall tax bill to 56%! We're taxed when we make; we're taxed when we spend it; we're taxed when we save it. GREED is the great driving force in they 21st century.

The tax rate that drove the good citizens of the American Colonies to war was something like the outrageous amount of 2%. I can easily imagine what they would think of us today.

And this is "progress"?

"Tyrannous abuse of the taxing power was a principal provocation of the American Revolution in 1776 and, according to this philosophy, will always be considered and treated as just cause for prompt, effective, remedial action by every generation of Americans worthy of the American heritage of Individual Liberty--the heritage of Free Man determined to preserve his Freedom from Government-over-Man. This can be done mainly through preserving inviolate the supporting system of constitutionally limited government, designed to restrict government's activities and therefore its cost and taxes." (from The Twelve Basic American Principles)

If what we are experiencing in the way of taxation today in the U.S. isn't "tyrannous" then I don't know what would be. I think it might be time for a New Revolution!