With nary 500 days to go, Bill Gates bid to rid the web of spam “in the next two years” is now growing even gloomier as the web’s biggest internet provider: AOL is saying thanks, but no thanks. The culprit? Those ever so pesky patents and the related licensing concerns as complained about by Apache and other open source initatives recently.

It would not adopt Microsoft’s SenderID protocol because it has failed to win over experts leery of Microsoft’s business practices. “AOL will now not be moving forward with full deployment of the SenderID protocol,” AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said in a statement.

In some ways I’m sorry to see it going this way. Microsoft is well-intentioned, I think, in this move with SenderID but their desire to ‘own’ vs. grant/give back is what is causing pause from other major bodies. Nothing significant is going to move on this front until these licensing concerns are cleared up. I hope they work through this because something — whatever it is — has to be done about the spam problem; it continues to poison the email well.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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