In early 2006, AOL and Yahoo announced plans to charge senders of email a small "postage fee" to have their email delivered to AOL and Yahoo customers. This fee would cost roughly one-fourth of a penny per email, so small as to be virtually insignificant. While not particularly onerous in the context of real space, where delivering mail has per item costs, this was a potential blow to the emerging politics of the internet world.At the time, these companies argued that this postage fee was a measure that would help reduce spam and identity theft.