Comment Destruction of commons (Score 3, Insightful) 275
The tainting of links is very much like Verisign's infamous SiteFinder. It takes a central piece of the medium and tries to bend it to do something else. Yes, links can be used to link to ads, but the very idea of WWW is that the links are meaningful: That they offer something that gives more information in relation to the subject at hand.
When more links are ads than something meaningful, surfers will learn to beware of them, which in turn is poison to hypertext, rendering it into 'just text'. We should not have to steer clear of links just in case they turn out to be ad-traps that slow down our surfing with pop-ups or pop-intos.
The infrastructure of Web is common property. Are the advertisers allowed to corrupt and destroy something that belongs to all of us?
