The headline on this story refers to Pac Bell’s DSL outage in the San Francisco Bay Area on Thursday. But look closely at the part about America Online, which is fighting email spam by blocking legitimate mail.
AOL is now so big and so powerful that its actions have huge impacts on Internet users everywhere. When it makes these kinds of arbitrary decisions — banning mail that merely looks as though it might be spam, it is going far beyond the boundaries of propriety.
No one likes spam except the sleazeballs who send it. But AOL is acting even worse in response.
Is the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission watching?