Guest Post: " Gmail & The FEC: High Noon For Email?" (OnlyInfluencers.com)
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
While movie Westerns have largely gone out of style (replaced by superhero films?), they’ve left a useful collection of archetypes floating around the meme-o-sphere. When the news of Google’s offer to route authorized political emails to the inbox started breaking, the cliché of the ‘Bad Sheriff’ popped to mind. If you’ve ever seen a Western where The Sheriff who is supposed to be on the side of law & order is in the pocket of the Big Rancher or the Local Gang...that’s the one (not the plot of High Noon btw).
There’s quite a bit of historical wisdom in the Bad Sheriff archetype. As frontiers mature, the winners from rule-less frontier start shaping the new rules to preserve their hard-won empire. Pirates become governors (Morgan); rail barons start universities (Stanford). Zuckerberg suggesting revisions to Section 230, with different standards for ‘smaller platforms’ is the modern version for the digital frontier.
Most recently, Google proposed a change to the FEC:
The company has asked the Federal Election Commission for approval on a plan to make emails from "authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership political action committees registered with the FEC" exempt from spam detection, as long they abide by Gmail's rules on phishing, malware, and illegal content.
Viewed in terms of market structure and evolution, I think Google’s offer is significant for the email space regardless of the specifics of their proposal. Google isn’t proposing changes in email standards here; they’re proposing that they be allowed to organize and deliver email differently for an identified sub-set of senders.