pay for email considered harmful

AOL, Yahoo and Goodmail: Taxing Your Email for Fun and Profit

The justification is that if people have to pay to send email, they won't send junk email. Apparently AOL and Yahoo believe that if we "tax" speech then only desirable speech happens. We all know how well that works for postal mail — that's why no one gets any "free" AOL starter disks, right?

That is all I have to say about this.

Update : Yahoo! provides some clarification about their plans about this. They plan to use the Goodmail system for "transactional" email messages such as bank statements and order receipts only