Eventually, AOL and Yahoo, and any other yahoos who decide to sign up for Goodmail's bad mail will also lose. Some users will simply know better and jump to an ISP that doesn't prevent them from getting legitimate email. Other users will tie up the technical support lines and even if that means some poor worker in Asia winds up listening to more Americans screaming, eventually it'll still cost the big companies more to pay more and more underpaid offshore labor.

Then, there will be the lawsuits. You know this stuff is catnip to the legal industry. Someone's not going to get an important email and the damages will be huge. Some group of individuals, a class of people, won't get their email messages and AOL is going to find itself at the business end of a class action lawsuit. Some key Time Warner exec won't get his 8,000 mile checkup email reminder from Lexus and will wind up stuck along the side of the road.

And, of course, the wonderment we know of as email will lose. Email has been under assault by spammers and spyware crafters for years. We hoped our underlying tools would help us out, but we've found ourselves spending more and more time protecting ourselves from those who'd do us harm through email. And now, our own email providers are getting in the way.

If this continues, how far will it go? Already, most ISPs block port 25, meaning you can't run your own email server. Most won't even let you send mail through your own email server, even if it's not on their network. For example, even though ZATZ has a series of uber-servers for sending email, when I send out a personal email from home, I'm forced by my ISP (who happens to be Time-Warner!) to send the message through their server.

How long will it be before ISPs start to filter our outgoing messages? When the next presidential election comes around, will all messages that are pro-Republican or pro-Democratic or pro-Choice or pro-Life going to be delayed, or even just deleted in transit?

Will Goodmail morph into "Right-Thinking Mail?" They're already blocking your email boxes. How long will it be before companies like this use textual analysis to read the meaning of your messages and replace your words with other words? You know the technology's there now. You can no longer trust that a message with your friend's email address is indeed from your friend. How long will it be before you can no longer trust that a message your friend wrote is exactly what you read?

These are tough issues and disturbing questions. The publishing industry is desperately attempting to route around the problem using technologies like RSS (Really Simple Syndication), where you subscribe to feeds directly from the publisher and the information relationship is directly between you and the publisher.

We at OutlookPower Magazine believe this is a bigger issue, one that may require legislation, prosecution, and enforcement. Like racketeering has become illegal, we believe this form of digital racketeering, bribery, blocking, forced routing, and rewriting of our information must not be allowed to continue. While most members of Congress are still somewhat new to the issues of electronic communication, most likely they each have a family member who uses AOL.

Just explain to them that they're no longer able to reliably send email to their kids without paying a bribe. Explain to them that their words may get twisted in transit. Explain to them that this really is Big Brother and they're likely to be hurt as well. After all, members of Congress use email, too.

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise, has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com.