Everyone knows a business has a critical need, and has discretion, to control and establish its own rules for its email system, right? After all, in the amazingly short period since email came into use in 1993, this secure, confidential and highly efficient medium is used billions of times each business day for immediate employee-to-employee and a multitude of other business communications. (Compare, email’s most comparable predecessor, the paper “Internal Memo” typed by the admin, and sent by “inter-office mail”).

Specifically, we know that business should prohibit messages that include sexually explicit, discriminatory, or other inappropriate content. Business needs to prohibit email communications containing confidential content between employees and competitors. And in the same vein, businesses can prohibit communications originating from third parties or internal dissidents who seek to use the businesses’ own email system against it, for the purpose of establishing an organization to advocate against the institutional interests of the business, right?

Actually, the answers to the very first and last questions soon will be a stringent, “No,” according to the National Labor Relations Board.