CHARGING businesses for e-mail could wind up costing consumers in the end, advocates say. "This is a bad idea from the consumer standpoint," said Jeannine Kenney of the Consumers Union, the non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. "If vendors now feel they have to pay a fee, that cost will ultimately be passed on to the consumer."

Yahoo and America Online, two of the world's biggest e-mail account providers, have said they plan to introduce a service that would charge large e-mailers - usually businesses - a fee to route their e-mail directly to a user's mailbox without first passing through junk-mail filters.

The fees - ranging from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per e-mail - are the latest attempts by the companies to weed out unsolicited bulk ads called spam, and identity-theft scams. In exchange for the fee, senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered and will bear a seal alerting recipients they're legitimate.

"It breaks down to whether consumers can rely on the protection they're getting from their Internet service providers," Kenney said. The fees will create the impression that companies can or conceivably can "buy their way around" the protection already in place, she said. "Your spam filter service should allow consumers to get the kind of e-mail they want, while blocking out the e-mail they don't want," she said.

Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America, said AOL and Yahoo "have no market power". There are "perhaps thousands" of Internet service providers now that don't charge for e-mail. "Consumers are in no way, shape or manner forced to get that service from (AOL and Yahoo), as opposed to telephone companies, where consumers don't have nearly as many choices," he said.

Cooper recalled that in the early days of the Internet, the big providers wanted to charge people, but so many smaller, regional Internet service providers gave it for free that they were unable to make prices stick.

"AOL is bleeding customers. Their ability to coerce you to step up to that service is beyond their grip on the market. It's the same as the issue between the Internet providers and bulk e-mailers," he said.

"If they do that, they may lose more customers," Cooper said.
The e-mail issue comes up at a time when the Senate Commerce Committee will begin looking at "Net neutrality," or a ban to stop Internet access companies from giving preferred status to certain content providers. The concern is that companies that do not pay could find it hard to reach customers or attract new ones, threatening the openness of the Internet.

A national poll conducted by Consumers Union and Consumer Federation found that more than 75 per cent of Internet users are seriously concerned about having free choice on their Internet service provider, or being required to pay twice for certain Internet services. Another 70 per cent were concerned about providers blocking or impairing their access to Internet services or sites, such as Internet telephone service or online retailers.

Executives of several large telecommunications companies, including Bell South 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.

Payment should come from only one direction, Kenney said. If consumers pay for a service, but their subscription services also have to pay, it will raise the cost for consumers.
"They can't have it both ways," Kenney said.

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