The big web story of the day is the FTC’s fight against spyware (or should we call it a War on Ads), charging a company with having deployed software that “changed users’ home pages, installed advertising and software programs on the users’ computers, and caused a deluge of pop-up windows to appear on computer screens — without the users’ consent. In some instances, the complaint says the codes caused computers to “malfunction, slow down, crash or cease working properly.’” This is a problem so serious that it is a job for free enterprise.
Indeed, the government’s last foray into improving our surfing was a flop. At the 2004 Spam Conference in Cambridge, the 500 experts in attendence found the government’s law against Spam to be so irrevelevant that it “barely rated a mention” (according to the NYT). “Most speakers were putting their hopes in technological, not legal solutions.” Imagine that! There are many programs that handle the problem, some free, some not, some old and some new, in fact so many that it is hard to choose. But there’s the market at work: choice not coercion.
