The e-Mail tax: It's not an urban legend anymore.

America On-Line, that 5000-pound gorilla which has dominated internet access and has been littering our landscape with plastic and metal waste for many years now wants to seriously degrade the quality of our internet communications.

Apparently, AOL wants to create a two-tiered e-mail system where mass-mailers (read: spammers) who pay an exorbitant shakedown fee to AOL will have thir messages receive top priority while those of the lowly AOL home and business user will be shunted off to AOL's slow lanes and spam buckets.

If this scheme catches on, let's put it this way, if you liked the U.S. Postal service with their regular (until recently) as-clockwork rate increases, you're going to love this latest scheme by mammoth corporations to milk the Internet for every penny it can possibly scam. The logical conclusion of this plan is costly, mediocre service for average users and total domination of net communications by advertisers and corporations which exist to meet their needs, not ours. Kind of like the way television is now.

I would like to suggest that you read up on this odious proposal and do something about it before the free and open internet we now take for granted becomes just a fond memory.