Group Says It May Post AOL User Addresses

The opposing interests of electronic commerce and individual privacy erupted in conflict Tuesday after a small Internet business group threatened to make public the e-mail addresses of 1 million of America Online’s 10 million users if the giant service continues to bar the businesses from pitching their products online to AOL members.

The Chino-based National Organization of Internet Commerce said it would post the e-mail addresses on its own Web site at the stroke of midnight Wednesday, making them available for downloading by any business, group or individual seeking to make mass electronic mailings.

The organization said it would leave the names posted for 24 hours unless AOL offered small businesses a way to reach its 10 million members through inexpensive electronic means.

That threat could exacerbate one of the biggest problems on the global computer network: the proliferation of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages, commonly referred to as “spam.” For those who pay for the time they remain connected to an online service, spam can be a costly, intrusive and time-consuming nuisance. Many users complain that among the items inundating their electronic in-boxes are annoying or offensive messages, some of them hawking pornography or get-rich-quick schemes.

Dulles, Va.-based AOL has been the target of a disproportionate share of spam mailings, in part because its user base is an alluring mass market for online merchandisers. But the service has become increasingly aggressive in its spam-fighting efforts, on some occasions attempting to electronically block bulk mailings from certain sources. Over the last several months, AOL has also filed a string of lawsuits against senders of unsolicited e-mail, winning several injunctions against them in federal court.

The marketers, meanwhile, insist they should have a right to pitch their wares unhindered via e-mail, much as direct marketers use the U.S. mails to reach thousands of people at a time. The attraction of e-mail marketing is that it is less expensive than bulk mailings because senders do not pay postage.

Already AOL, other Internet service providers and direct marketers have been meeting to design a self-policing solution that would stave off action by the Federal Trade Commission, which held hearings on the spam issue earlier this year.

Joe Melle, president of the National Organization of Internet Commerce, said his trade group is making the threat against AOL because it believes the service is trying to put small companies out of business. He said in an interview with The Times that barring the use of affordable bulk e-mail on the network would close off access to as many as half the regular users of the Internet. Meanwhile, established merchants such as Barnes & Noble and 1-800-FLOWERS have paid millions of dollars for direct access to AOL’s customers.

“We’re not trying to punish AOL or get on their bad side. We want to do business with them,” said David Cecil, vice president of an Internet service provider in Lexington, Ky., who serves on NOIC’s board of directors. “AOL is a very recognized name and a lot of companies want to sell to AOL customers.”

On Tuesday, America Online sent a sharply worded letter to NOIC promising to “seek full legal redress, including compensatory and punitive damages,” if the e-mail addresses are posted on the Web.

“We really view this as an act of threatened cyber-terrorism, and we don’t intend to give in to it,” Randall Boe, associate general counsel for the world’s biggest Internet service provider, told The Times. “If they think it will cause us to reconsider our position on unsolicited bulk e-mail, they’re wrong.”

AOL customers lodge thousands of complaints about spam every day, Boe said.

Others said the posting threat could have broader consequences for the Internet’s usefulness as a communications and commerce medium.

The posting “would create a hostile environment between the Internet service providers and the e-mail industry and would only be counterproductive,” said Jay McCrensky, executive director of the Assn. for Internet Marketing in Chevy Chase, Md., a direct mailer that has been participating in the multi-industry talks. “We are adamantly opposed to that tactic.”

The situation also raises some intriguing legal issues. Since America Online operates a private network, the e-mail addresses of its members are private property, said Shari Steele, staff attorney of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. But once an AOL member ventures out into a chat room or onto an Internet newsgroup, his or her e-mail address essentially enters the public domain, she said.

“I don’t think it’s illegal to gather the e-mail addresses of people who participate in chat and [Internet-based] Usenet newsgroups,” Steele said. “There’s no legal reason and no technical reason why they couldn’t do this.”

And while AOL has successfully fought spammers in court, it has yet to do battle with a group that is merely providing a list of e-mail addresses but not sending messages itself.

As a practical matter, the e-mail addresses NOIC said it will post are already for sale on CD-ROMs that contain 1 million to 43 million addresses each and cost between $35 and $299. TSF Marketing of Ontario, one of the organization’s founding members, collected the addresses with specially designed software and is donating the names to NOIC, Melle said.

“Obviously, the explosion that we’ve seen in spam indicates that e-mail addresses are fairly easy to harvest,” said David Sobel, legal counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “The ultimate loser is the user, who is going to be subject to even more unwanted e-mail.”