AOL's Dirty Little Spam Secret

[IanDavid]

Has anyone else noticed that AOL Time Warner is pursuing business partnerships with the very same spam-havens hosting the spammers they are suing?

That's like the cops going into a crack house and arresting the drug addicts, while they give the operators of the crack house a big loan to expand their business.

I refer in particular to America OnLine's dealings with China Telecom and Netcom.

And the last time I checked, Yahoo! was already partnered with Verio, another major spam-mill-- yet Yahoo! is also suing verio-hosted spammers.

AOL confirmed looking into this Faustian bargain as far back at least as March 2003

http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2003/m...30328bus17.html

http://www.etexpo.com/shownews.asp?ID=276

“We’re talking about business (with China Telecom and Netcom), but we didn’t talk about a partnership yet,” she said. The AOL spokesman confirmed that the venture was looking at possibly bringing in an additional partner.

As of March 2004, AOL appears to be courting the same strange bedfellows

http://www.chinesesource.com/get_detail.cfm?id=1040

http://www.newsgd.com/business/enterprise/200403010031.htm

"Likely candidates could include China's mobile phone giants of China Mobile (Hong Kong) Ltd and China Unicom Ltd; and its top two fixed line carriers, China Telecom and China Netcom, which have both spent millions of dollars over the last two years to build out their high-speed Internet networks. "

And then there's the fact that one of AOL's board members is on something like The U.S. China Board of Trade. I forget her name, but the information is somewhere on my other computer. She was also something like "trade ambassador" to China.

And I bet if we dug around a little, we would find that AOL already has relationships with some of the other foreign spam mills, particularly in Italy and Korea.

Does anyone want to resarch and publish on this with me?

Specifically, which of the spammers AOL is suing are hosted on the spam havens that AOL has (or is pursuing) partnerships with.

These lawsuits against spammers by AOL are just window-dressing. They're blowing smoke to hide the fact that they are not only doing squat to stop spam, they are also actively pursuing alliances with the source.

If AOL really wanted to stop spam, they would not only stop pursuing business with spam mills, but block all traffic from them. AOL knows China Telecom and Netcom are the ones sending most of the spam to AOL accounts. They know what to do about it, but they won't.

I say, let's call them to task for it.

[dra007]

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