Prodigy punished heavy email users with surcharges, misunderstanding the social boom

Evidence

As the new craze for social hit all the networks, Prodigy, with its fixed business model and regimented corporate culture, reacted more with alarm than excitement. It began to panic at the overuse of its email system, especially when an internal survey revealed that just 5 percent of members were sending over 3.5 million email messages. And so the overlords decided to levy surcharges on “email hogs”—those who sent more than thirty per month. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 720

Categorization

• XREF: Prodigy’s corporate reaction to user activity prefigures today’s platform governance battles over usage, and parallels the reader’s interest in who controls attention flow.