Comments on: Will You Sign the AOL Petition, Too?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 00:29:36 +0000

The rumers is DEARAOL.COM is being used to collect e-mail address for spamers. Who is behind, owns DEARAOL.COM. The Whois info is hidden. Did you start it Chris?
I have signed and have blogged it. Now I worry I have done the wrong thing.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 02:42:06 +0000

Chris – very articulate and thoughtful post. I'm torn as I see the case you make for the precedence argument, but I feel that your application to the specifics of AOL is just wrong. According to Henry Blodget's blog, AOL still makes the vast majority of its total revenue and even its advertising revenue from its subscriber base. Here's his post in which he links to his research report on AOL:
http://www.internetoutsider.com/2005/11/while_time_warn.html
Thus, no matter how “valuable” this email revenue stream may be – even if it's several hundreds of millions of dollars, it couldn't come close to equaling the loss of subscriber revenue should people find that their email experience is unacceptably degraded. If anything AOL needs to do everything possible to keep subscribers.
If AOL was acquired through some sort of LBO in which the new management needed to quickly pay down debt, a scheme to ransom addresses to the highest bidder seems much more real. The current proposal, though, seems more likely to be aimed at protecting AOL's true golden goose – their subscribers.
arul.blogs.com

By: Tris Hussey

Tris Hussey — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 22:22:08 +0000

Blogged

By: Tris Hussey

Tris Hussey — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 19:48:28 +0000

Done, signed, to be blogged

By: Technick

Technick — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 13:20:38 +0000

Actually I am not really concerned with signing this. Think about the end effect here. I personally hate AOL and everything they stand for. AOL is not a real service provider, just a souped up BBS system. When and if this takes effect, users will not be able to receive the mail they want. What will users do at this point? Drop AOL and move on to a better service provider. AOL… so easy to us, no wonder it sucks.

By: Daniel C.

Daniel C. — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:33:35 +0000

Signed it myself, Digg it as well.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 06:17:06 +0000

Hey Chris, thanks for posting this. I went ahead and blogged it and signed the letter. Thanks and keep up the great site.