America Online plans to introduce a service that would charge businesses and other bulk e-mailers a fee to route their e-mail directly to a user’s mailbox without first passing through junk mail filters.

This seems like a bad idea to me for a couple of obvious reasons.

First, it will reward spammers by allowing them to bypass protections already in place to block them. You can make the argument that true spammers, whose e-mails aren’t simply unsolicited but outright scams, are unlikely to pay such a fee. But they very well might, in order to secure the appearance of legitimacy. After all, if AOL tells its customers that its junk mail filters protect them from spam, those customers will be naturally less suspicious of e-mail that passes through the filters. And if a bulk e-mailer is phishing for credit card numbers, he could very well use those credit cards to pay AOL’s proposed bulk e-mail fee.

The second problem, of course, is that those who can’t pay the fee may be more likely to find their e-mail messages filtered out by AOL as junk, legitimate or not.

All of this has been pointed out already by MoveOn.org and others, which is how I first heard about it. (I don’t use AOL and have no intention of ever doing so.) What really confuses me, though, is something AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham told the press:

“There is no substantive news here, just because some disparate groups of advocates have come together for an event reminiscent of the bar scene in the first ‘Star Wars’ movie.”

I’m confused because…well, what the hell is he talking about? How exactly is a bulk e-mail fee reminiscent of the Mos Eisley Cantina scene? It certainly seems as wrong-headed as Greedo shooting first; but, really, the entire reference just seems a little out-of-left-field, doesn’t it? Is he talking about the scene right before (after?) wherein Obi-Wan Kenobi tells the Stormtroopers, “These are not the droids you’re looking for,” and then befuddles their brains with the old Jedi mind tricks? Because that makes a little more sense in this context. But keep in mind — those actually were the droids the troopers were looking for. Extend the metaphor, and what Graham’s saying is that there is news here but he’s going to confuse us into ignoring it. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, and all of that.