Postage on email?

AOL and Yahoo will soon start using a system where you can buy you past their spam filters to make sure your mail reaches the recipient.

The Internet companies say that this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users of their services. The two companies also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.

I simply don't believe this is the real reason, it is just a lame excuse for earning more money and I think it's going to be a major failure. They will end up alienating many of their customers.

This news comes after some of the big telcos are warming up to kill the "network neutrality" of the internet. what they would like to see is that since they own the cables in the ground, the content companies like Google and Skype should pay to provide a "premium service" to their customers. It'll be interesting to see where this goes. I know I will get mad if my ISP starts on this. I pay for access to the internet and I want to decide myself what I use it for.

Update: Arstechnica has written about this too now.