• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, April 25, 2006

Internet service providers have always had tremendous power to control the flow of information but, for the most part, they haven't wielded the power to impede communication--or, at least, wanted communication.

But that situation appears to be changing, thanks to aggressive, but faulty, spam filters. This weekend, Verizon DSL's spam filters accidentally blocked e-mails from some other e-mail providers, including Roadrunner and Gmail. A Verizon spokeswoman told the Minute that the gaffe was due to a systems upgrade and was resolved within 31 hours.

"It turns out we had a bug in the code, and that caused some servers from various large ISPs to get blocked," she said. "We found this bug through our own monitoring over the weekend and, when we found it we fixed it, and it's been completely resolved."

Perhaps that particular situation has been resolved, for now. But the Verizon blunder wasn't an isolated example. AOL recently also halted delivery of e-mails that contained the url DearAOL.com. That site was created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other activists to criticize AOL for its plan to guarantee delivery of e-mail, but only to marketers who have paid a fee to the company Goodmail.

AOL said the failure to deliver those e-mails was a "glitch," and not deliberate censorship.

Still, the more "glitches" that are caused by poor spam filters, the less people can trust ISPs to deliver their messages--and the greater the incentive to pay for guaranteed delivery.

For now, there are plenty of watchdogs to alert the ISPs, and the public, as to wrongly blocked e-mail. But consumer vigilance can only extend so far. Ultimately, it will be up to lawmakers and the courts to hold ISPs accountable for giving consumers the services they're paying for--which include, at a minimum, the ability to send and receive information online.