America Online Inc. has adopted a new tactic against spam: blocking its members' ability to see Web sites promoted by bulk e-mailers.
The policy, which began earlier this year, opens a new front in the war on spam but also makes the Dulles company the first of its kind to push past the traditional Internet orthodoxy that service providers should be neutral conduits to anything the World Wide Web has to offer.
Lawyer Paul M. Smith said AOL may help stem spam, but some users want what spammers sell.
(Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)
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Many spammers advertise products -- including body-enhancement pills, pirated software and get-rich-quick schemes -- by including links in their e-mail to Internet sites that display the wares and process orders. AOL members attempting to visit a blocked Web page receive an error message that says a connection to the page could not be made, but are not told that it is a spammer's site that has been placed off limits. No other notification of the policy is provided.
"Essentially, we have vastly improved AOL's ability to restrict identified spammers' sites from being accessed by our members online," said company spokesman Nicholas J. Graham. He said AOL is choosing which sites to block based on complaints from its members, who can report spam that they receive to the company.
Graham said the Web site blocking policy has contributed to, for the first time, a reduction in the amount of bulk mail that spammers are trying to send to its members.
The move highlights the fact that Internet providers have the ability to block users from seeing certain content. Indeed, in trying to short-circuit the income stream of spammers, AOL is attacking one of the most vexing truths about the spam problem: Some people want and buy the products, which helps keeps the spammers in business.
"There is a service to AOL members by doing this," said Paul M. Smith, a Washington lawyer who specializes in Internet and media law. "But there's some trade-off . . . because some people want to go to those sites. It shows that there can be in the world of the Internet some serious issues raised by a small number of companies that [control] bottlenecks to the flow of information."
Although AOL has joined hands with Internet service competitors EarthLink Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. to sue spammers and to develop new technologies for blocking spam, AOL is alone in its move to try to cut off access to commerce Web sites advertised via spam.
EarthLink spokeswoman Carla Shaw said her service has begun to block Web sites that are linked from spam that purports to be from EarthLink. In a scam known as phishing, the e-mail directs users to sites that look like they are EarthLink's and asks for personal data. AOL has blocked phishing sites for about a year.
Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo block access to Web sites for their e-mail account holders.
Legal experts said there is nothing in the AOL strategy that violates free-speech laws. And Internet service providers (ISPs) have long provided parents the ability to block content from their children.
"The model of the Internet always came with some substantial latitude for the ISP to pick and choose," said James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a public interest group. "What we're talking about is a byproduct of the strain spam is placing on the Internet. There's no doubt that spam is forcing ISPs and others to some extreme measures."
But Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said AOL's intentions are good, but blocking Web sites is "paternalistic." She said she worries that system could be abused by someone seeking to block a rival's Web site by spamming AOL members with that link.
Graham said AOL abides by a Pennsylvania law that requires ISPs to block access to child-pornography sites. That law is being challenged by civil liberties groups because the list of blocked sites is determined by the state attorney general's office. Government deciding what people can see or read violates the First Amendment, these groups say.
Graham said that the combination of improved filtering, stepped-up legal actions and the Web site blocking could be turning spammers away from AOL, whose members have been a prime spam target. According to AOL's numbers on Feb. 20, 2.6 billion pieces of spam were sent to AOL accounts. On March 17, the number was 1.9 billion.
Statistics from other Internet providers, e-mail security companies and market research firms show that overall spam traffic has held steady for the past several months at about 60 percent of all e-mail traffic.
