The Federal Trade Commission is mulling a plan to target companies that advertise through adware and spyware, hoping to shame those companies into discontinuing the practice. That approach would use economics to curtail the spread of spyware and adware — programs that are installed on a users’ computer without their knowledge and then cause advertising to pop up when they visit Web sites. If advertisers stopped paying for the privilege of having their ads generated with the tools, adware makers would no longer have an incentive to propagate the software.
It's the slippery slope thing. What the critics are really afraid of (and I'm one of them) is that the experiment will be successful and before long everyone will be copying the procedure, that it will leak to private user, and, eventually, we will all have to pay for what was always free. It happened to cable which was supposed to deliver programs w/o commericials for a small fee. And it will happen to the internet unless we keep the money grubbers away. I don't get spam! If I do it goes in my 'junk' folder. I'm no professional: anyone who cares can prevent the onslaught of spam -- use Firefox, have adblockers and spam eliminators, don't open strange attachmentsk, etc. How many times have we heard this; but the problem persists. I don't get spam and I don't want to pay for the lazy 90% of the users who do. PG
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FTC May Wage ‘Shame’ Campaign Against Adware
Posted by: Keith Regan February 10, 2006 11:54 AMThe Federal Trade Commission is mulling a plan to target companies that advertise through adware and spyware, hoping to shame those companies into discontinuing the practice. That approach would use economics to curtail the spread of spyware and adware — programs that are installed on a users’ computer without their knowledge and then cause advertising to pop up when they visit Web sites. If advertisers stopped paying for the privilege of having their ads generated with the tools, adware makers would no longer have an incentive to propagate the software.
It happened to cable which was supposed to deliver programs w/o commericials for a small fee. And it will happen to the internet unless we keep the money grubbers away.
I don't get spam! If I do it goes in my 'junk' folder. I'm no professional: anyone who cares can prevent the onslaught of spam -- use Firefox, have adblockers and spam eliminators, don't open strange attachmentsk, etc. How many times have we heard this; but the problem persists. I don't get spam and I don't want to pay for the lazy 90% of the users who do.
PG