(The following articles
have been archived for both instructional and referential purposes. To read
the full articles please follow the links to the source located at the bottom.)
Gator Attack? The Best Defense Is to Join the Anti-Microsoft
Offense
By Tig Tillinghast
August 31, 2001
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade group of ad
sellers, is rightly concerned about a new technology called Gator. The technology
runs with a browser and provides some useful services, including filling out
forms automatically, remembering passwords, and -- oh, yes -- replacing that
pesky site advertising with banners of its own choosing.
You can see why this would enrage advertising-supported sites. What makes them
hysterical, though, is that it seems to be legal. This warrants some examination...
People can tolerate advertising on their favorite sites when it
makes those services free. It's sort of like a social contract -- an implicit
agreement between groups that allows for practical governance. But the Internet
industry hasn't matured enough yet to establish deep grooves of accepted obligations
among these groups. For instance, we're accustomed to advertising in our publications,
but what about the browsers themselves carrying ads? What about browsers superimposing
their ads atop the ones found on Web sites? These are issues that we haven't
yet digested.
We do have some precedent. Back in the good old days of the browser
wars between Microsoft and Netscape (disclosure: Microsoft was my client, and
I helped launch a couple of major versions of Explorer), search engines briefly
experimented with programs that they distributed to users. These programs modified
the code of the major browsers to put little proprietary search boxes in the
top banners of browser screens. The effort, tried by Infoseek and Excite, for
example, failed to get much penetration, at least partly because the browser
companies kept on churning out new versions of code that proved incompatible.
But it was never legally challenged successfully. In essence, people accepted
that audiences could choose to modify their browsers to deliver additional services
and advertising.
Moreover, several browser plug-ins have been made available over
the years that will blot out advertising for no other reason than anticapitalist
pique. Again, no successful legal challenges have resulted, even though publications
are shown to these users without any advertising. Site managers I've talked
to tell me that they don't care much about these plug-ins because the penetration
has been so low. The cynical side of me notes that publications likely don't
care because the advertisers still have to pay for the impression that was never
seen.
So now we have a brilliant execution of the combination of these
two ideas: an application that blots out ads and then replaces it with its own
advertising in exchange for services rendered to the user. And there's the rub:
The governing relationship here is between the user and the various services
he or she chooses to engage. The user selects a browser, selects a site, and
might -- at his or her whim -- also choose a third-party service such as Gator.
Read
the full article at ClickZ ...
