The debate over how to deal with Spam ignores the most important issue: censorship on the Internet is already an accepted and publicly acknowledged policy and most people don't realize that.

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Recently America On Line announced its intention to start charging people a "license fee" to send bulk email to AOL subscribers.

The resulting shiver traveling up the spines of mailing list managers and Internet providers all over the world quickly morphed into an all too rare quasi-collective outcry that actually forced AOL into a half-step backwards. Upon reconsideration, the Internet giant announced, it would continue to offer the license but, for those who don't want the license, it would also continue to treat bulk email as it has up to now.

Whatever sighs of relief one might discern are, I think, the sounds of an Internet community threatened with a deadly kick to the head and now relieved that it only has to cope with a boot on its throat.

In fact, the entire debate over the potential harm in AOL's plan overshadows the fact that large commercial providers' response to the problem of "spam" already represents a dangerous and potentially crippling attack on the culture and functioning of the Internet as a vehicle of free speech.

Now let's be clear: email is in crisis because of the huge amount of unwanted bulk email we all receive.

The issue here isn't that the large providers have finally recognized the problem and are trying to deal with it. Trying to dehumidify the house when it's already flooded may show a lack of vision but it's not unjustified.

The problem is their response and at its root -- always a good place to start -- their definition of "spam".

Most people have a pretty simple definition of spam: it's bulk email we don't want.

There's also a popular definition that flows from the "unwanted bulk email" definition: spam is bulk email sent without a reasonable expectation that the people receiving it would be interested in it.

That definition developed because most spam you receive is sent by people who have acquired or purchased huge lists of emails with no reasonable expectation that the people on that list would want to read what they're being sent. It's "shotgun" marketing in its crudest form. So the "reasonable expectation of interest" is a pretty important component.

But the commercial Internet ignores that. Instead, the large providers define spam as "unsolicited bulk email": email sent to more than a small handful of people some of whom didn't ask for it. They do that because they have no idea what you might want or be interested in and have yet to develop a method of figuring that out.

Instead, embarassed by their tardiness and frightened by customer unhappiness, they've declared a war against almost all bulk email, making the term "spam" useless and making email censorship an accepted and publicly acknowledged policy.

They tag bulk email the moment someone complains and make it so easy to complain that people can just push the "complaint" button without knowing the ramifications. If there are a number of complaints -- usually three or four are good enough -- they will block the issuer of that email. They monitor "emailers" who are sending the same email to more than a handful of people and "list" those who have had complaints lodged against them so those with a "complaint history" can be blocked more quickly.

What's most dangerous, they keep records of the sender's IP address -- the numeric address of the server the sender uses.

Those efforts are supported by a mini-industry of "spam detection" companies -- the Internet's version of the vigilante -- who do conduct similar monitoring and then publish blacklists of "suspected spammers and hosts".

So to have your email to a subscriber of these providers blocked, you don't even have to send bulk email. All you need do is share a server with people who've been "listed" and almost all of us do.

Bringing the danger of all this into relief, some companies take short-cuts that effectively stop communications -- "spam" or not. AOL routinely blocks, hinders or delays emails with the same content sent to more than a threshold number of AOL subscribers. Many Internet workers think the "threshold" is about 50 to 100. AOL isn't saying. But the interference occurs and it makes no difference if these people have signed on to the email list or not.

In general, short-cut or not, if you are a subscriber of a major commercial provider, there is a good possibility you're not receiving all the legitimate email being sent you, including messages from a list to which you've subscribed.

You'll never know it unless you notice something wrong: they don't tell you that they've hijacked your email. The people who sent it to you won't be informed. They don't tell the provider either. THAT I know from personal experience. We find out if someone tells us that recipients of their email are mysteriously not receiving it. Then we inquire with the provider of that recipient and, to remove the "block, we must engage in a Kafkaesque process that consumes time and energy and must often be repeated periodically.

While blocking and destroying your email is clearly an attack on the First Amendment, the timing and political import shouldn't be lost on anyone. Just at the time when the progressive movement is starting to use the Internet effectively, we're faced with measures that could drive us into silence.

All of the major, successful Internet campaigns run by progressive activists (from impeachment to health care to anti-war to Katrina) use unsolicited email. How could it be otherwise? How in the world do you communicate with people to get them information they don't have if you only email to people who've told you they want it? We could never build a campaign or expand it that way.

Our traditional tools have always included leaflets in the mail, flyers handed out, public speeches, phone calls and now this powerful Internet. We've been able to use those tools because, for a century, we have fought tooth and nail to protect and expand our constitutional right to protected speech.

Sure, unwanted email can be a pain. The same is true of bulk postal mail, leaflets activists shove in your face during a rally and the insistence of street organizers that they have a message you should spend minutes of your valuable time listening to.

But few of us would ask the post office to stop any of our mail or ask the police to arrest a street organizer. We understand that, in the end, these inconvenient "incursions" benefit us all and sometimes give us information we need. We also understand that repression of these activities would create a far greater problem than the one it solves.

And there's little question that it will get worse because our movements are making major headway using the Internet and we're mailing to many more people than ever before. This automatically means greater monitoring, a higher incidence of unprovoked blocking and more complaints.

What's most painfully ironic about this commercial response to "spam" is that it punishes us for something someone else is doing. Our movements don't email to large lists we know nothing about. We can't afford it and we don't organize that way. Movement bulk email is sent to carefully developed lists, usually shared organization to organization, based on recipients' demonstrated interest in the issue we're emailing about.

That's not "spam" by any reasonable definition...except the commercial providers'.

What's the answer to spam? Even those of us careful to balance the real need to protect people against unwanted bulk email and to protect free speech in the process haven't come up with a solution. That's going to require a full public discussion of the issue that goes beyond the industry boundaries.

The commercial Internet is not going to come up with the right solution unless the people who use the Internet force it to and the first step in that process is for our movement to enter the debate, force it beyond the limited term "spam" and make the protection of our communications and organizing as high a point on the agenda as the protection of people's email in-boxes.