It is because America Online stands to make billions of dollars by 
forcing its subscribers to view only those messages whose advocates can 
afford to pay America Online whatever it wants to charge.  
    
If people could bypass America Online, and take their message directly to  
the people themselves, America Online will not be able to make any money at all, nor will they be able to control what their messages  
their subscribers will see. 
  
    
"With television advertising, the money paid by the advertiser goes to the 
producers of content; with spam, the money paid by the advertiser does not 
go to the producers of content." This statement misconceives the 
situation in two ways. First, the cost of advertising is passed on to 
consumers in the form of higher prices. Second-- and this is the most 
important point I have to make today-- paying television networks for 
advertising doesn't make the advertisement more acceptable; it makes it 
less acceptable. 
    
According to this view, it is okay to be forced to watch a 
commercial message, as long as some giant corporation pays another giant 
corporation millions of dollars to make you watch it. This view is simply 
antithetical to the principles of free speech. According to it, the only 
ideas that you can be involuntarily exposed to, are the ideas of those 
corporations who can afford to pay off any of a very small number of very 
powerful and almost completely unaccountable media monopolies. This means 
that the relatively small number of people who control nearly all of the 
world's wealth will continue to do so unopposed. The promise of the 
Internet is that it can reduce corporate control of the media, and create 
a world in which NBC has little more control over what people can and 
cannot see than you or I do. 
   
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