"Should screen-space, browser displays and the specific bandwidth that is used to carry a Web site's content --including the ads that pay its way, be assigned the same level of legal protections as licensed spectrum?"
Should licensed users of broadcast spectrum be allowed to use that resource for endless hours of infomercials?
For that matter, what about cable? I don't know about the States, but in Canada at application time, many channels make grandiose claims about the content they're going to provide. For a year or two, they deliver. Then they start to slack off. Possibly, they can't find/can't afford new content.
But the end result is content that doesn't even approach the quality that the licensor had intended.
Theoretically, the internet can allow end-users to exercise choice. Content can be priced so that advertising isn't needed - and many such websites exist. Unfortunately in most of North America, infrastructure has insufficient throughput to equal the broadcast equivalent.
The comments from the link imply a contract between the end user and the content provider: you can watch our stuff, but only if you watch our advertisers' message.
In fact, no such contract exists. Many advertisers on popular websites are piggybacking for their own gain, as opposed to subsidizing the provider's content, and the real contract is between the provider and the advertiser.
With recorded video the provider seeks to ensure the contract is honoured, by baffling technology meant to skip or evade advertising.
Advertising is big business, and many have been drawn into the fallacy that viewers or listeners have some kind of obligation to either the advertiser or the provider. Not so.
"But what if everyone felt that way?"
Then we wouldn't submit to the false notion that advertising is "content", and we'd find a new way to pay for what we want to see and hear.
Jim |
