It is said that a drug peddler always sells you the first few shots of drug for way below the market price. The logic behind this is simple: Once you are addicted to it, and once you feel you cannot do without it, you will pay whatever price he demands in order to get the product. So in the end he makes up pots os money, while you feel that you pay through your nose. Now, whoever thought that email providers would end up following the same business tactics as the nefarious narcotics smuggler.
Well, if you haven’t heard it already, this the news: There may no longer be such a free thing like free email. ’’USA.NET’’ one of the popular free email service providers has already intimated its subscribers that they will have to pay a fee to access the services. And there is a rumor of yahoo to going on the same model in America. The question now is will the Indian email providers like ’’rediffmail’’ follow suit and when?
Already, one Indian email provider ’’123india.com’’ is asking its subscribers to pay 99 RS a month. This is a special offer, meaning the subscription ratewill rise very soon. This is very similar to the satellite sport channels. Once morea nd more people get hooked, it becomes a ’’a pay channel’’. So I guess the writing is on the wall of Rinnai email users who were having such a merry time on the net, emailing all and sundry at the click of a mouse.
Certainly, companies, which have been enabling us to email anyone at any part of te world at the price of a phone call, are not running a charity. And like any business, they need to make e money as well. But is it reason enough to kill one of the main attractions of the interne? It is shown that email is the single biggest reason to why people get on the net. By charging them for that, even while significant sections of the population are sill to experience it, are they shooting themselves in the foot.
It is not that email providers have not been making any money all this while. They have been selling those banner ads, which pop on your screen. They have been giving away email lists to companies trying to sell their products. Then why have they become so greedy? If email does go ’’pay’’, we can envision only one possibility: users will jump from one free email provider to another. There are so many of them and that’s the magic of the net, which the business ’’bandits’’ want to deprive us of.