On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 11:49:41AM +1300, Andy Linton wrote:
On Mon, 7 Jan 2002, Joe Abley wrote:
On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 11:28:55AM +1300, Simon Byrnand wrote:
To use your own analogy its like TV advertisers being able to force you to watch their ads even when the TV is turned OFF. :)
There are safeguards in place to prevent unacceptable material being pushed down your throat through the television. They seem to work quite well; I don't remember Oscar ever having his Wigglesvission interrupted by advertisements for pornography.
But there are times when it gets pretty close. I'll bet Oscar gets Wigglesvission interrupted by ads for toys, other consumer stuff and adult programs later in the evening that you might well prefer he didn't see.
The point is that there are a finite, manageable number of people to police. That's not the case with e-mail, which has an effectively infinite number of people to police.
If you accept e-mail as a viable channel for advertising, you need to find a way to police advertising standards. Sounds like a hard problem.
In NZ TV has 5 or so public channels and policing their advertising is non trivial. How many potential sources of email-direct advertising material on the net? How many legal jurisdictions? You bet it's a hard problem.
Right. Sufficiently hard that it's difficult to see how it can ever be sufficiently well-policed to be considered as legitimate a channel for advertisers as the television is, I would say. Joe - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog