Delivering email newsletters to their clients has become a problem for smaller companies. The cause is the absense of email neutrality; the emerging tier system for classing email senders. Large corporations, like yahoo and Microsoft, have formed a top tier of email senders, and the small companies have been relegated to the bottom tier.

The struggle for email neutrality has been fought for years as email senders, like the small company newsletter authors, have fought to be included into the increasing number of email accreditation bodies. The struggle has been fought and ultimately lost.

Spam has forced several tiers of email senders onto the internet infrastructure. ISPs increasingly clear email based on not just blacklists like spamhaus.org, but also on white lists (or private accreditation organizations). The latest email accreditation list has been added by Goodmail, another email accrediation provider Goodmail Adds 15 ESP Partners

Goodmail, the e-mail accreditation provider generating controversy through its partnership with AOL, has signed up 15 new e-mail service providers to implement its CertifiedEmail service, including BlueStreak, Acxiom Digital, e-Dialog, Epsilon Interactive, ExactTarget, Harte-Hanks Postfuture, Responsys, Yesmail and Zustek.

On the receiving side, besides AOL, Goodmail is expected to be implemented soon by Yahoo, though no details have been shared.

The reputation space is wide open, with differing methodologies competing to see which can gain ground. Goodmail’s per-message fees strike some as the equivalent of e-mail postage, and has legislators and special interest groups whipped into a frenzy.
Other reputation providers, like Habeas and Return Path, take a more services-based approach, helping providers improve their sending practices instead of paying to send mail.
Which one of these methods will work best? Or will each find its own niche? Let me know what you think in the comments, or drop me a line at kevin-at-clickz-dot-com.

Nowadays large corporate marketing departments can buy good delivery of their mailing lists, whereas smaller company mailing lists do not get through.

It is true that the depreciation in telcos impact substantially on their return on equity. The telco infrastructures are expensive to maintain, specially when the investment was ill judged during the 2000 boom. Few ISPs are covering their depreciation with capital investment fully. An unfortunate fact for telco shareholders and directors.

Telcos would generate better profits by abolishing network neutrality, at the expense of profits for society as a whole. Large telco companies, specially encumbent former state companies, are not known for the wealth creation abilities. Small entrepreneurial companies have historically been the biggest source of GDP growth.

Giving further market concessions to a mature industry sector with a poor track record, at the expense of the small entrepreneurial company sector is short termism at its best

Quoting Susan Crawford blog it is a question of trust:

Why should we trust them now? We’ve already given them incentive after incentive, access to rights-of-way (presumably in exchange for common-carrier behavior, as Dan Berninger points out), and the regulatory shirts off our backs.

Helping telco companies make more profits is good for society as whole, or just the unlucky telco shareholders?

An extract from Cisco’s letter to congress, Cisco on net neutrality, reads as follows,

“We strongly support the principle of an open Internet,” Cisco CEO John Chambers wrote in a letter to Congressman Joe Barton, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “We must, however, balance the fact that innovation inside the network is just as important as innovation in services and devices connected to the Internet. Broadband Internet access service providers should remain free to engage in pro-competitive network management techniques to alleviate congestion, ameliorate capacity constraints and enable new services.”

I cannot help but think a good arms trading company would issue an identical statement on arm sales limiting legislation.

Martin Varsavsky is the ultimate disruptive innovator for the telecom’s sector. His companies have grossed billions of dollars in the retail end of the market. He diagnoses plain short term greed as telecom companies try and squeeze internet media companies for a part of the high margins.

In this case, it is fortunate that Europe regulates its markets more vigorously than the US. France is quoted as a good example of how IP transit business is forced to operate at arms length with its financial sales operation.

Dan Gillmor, the daddy of grassroots independent journalism on the net, has given a seminal speech
on the role of blogs in maintaining transparency and independence of journalism. In Dave’s words,

The cable and phone companies want to control not just the pipes through which our data moves. They also want to decide what will get delivered, in what order, and at what speed. They haven’t pulled this off yet, but they’re getting closer every day.

In this age of media consolidation, where newspapers and TV channels are owned by fewer and fewer companies, maintaining a free speech medium like blogs and the internet is imporntant for civil liberties.