| Just want to add that the same is the case in Norway. We have no
| commercials on the licence financed channels, and strict regulations on the
| others. The public opinion seems to be all behind this politic.
|
| It's not easy to speculate how this can be moved to cyberspace and the
| internet, but I know that the Norwegian laws for advertising will apply
| also things on-line, i.e. not too much violence, sex, sexism, hollow
| promises, etc.
(I have no faith in any agency's ability to filter the content
of the complete internet, personally. Is Norway going to
hire people to read each Internet packet entering the country?
Attempt to force non-Norwegian companies to either leave the
internet completely or conform to Norwegian law? My guess is
that not even the US with it's multi-trillion-dollar military
will be able to enforce domestic law globally.)
The bright side of Internet advertising is that it is going to be
-very- difficult to inflict ads on people which they truly do not want
to be exposed to. The entry cost on internet is very low,
and the coercive opportunities very limited.
Don't want to look at InfoSeek commercial when doing a web search?
Just write a little filter to remove them before displaying. -Really-
pissed by the commercials? Circulate your filter, or put up a website
offering the filtered service publicly.
I already see a number of secondary websearch sites up, which happen
to omit displaying any of the relevant advertising (although that
doesn't seem the primary motivation).
The Internet is inherently an active, programmable medium in a
way that TV never was. (Speaking of TV in past tense is wonderful! :)
It is also inherently many-to-many in a way that TV never was. Most
of the value on Internet consists of access to other private citizens
and their offerings, not mass-produced pap, and that will probably
remain true for a -long- time: Humans are simply more complex and
interesting than any artifact yet produced, by something like a
factor of 10^6 to 10^10. You can spend years talking to the same
person and never get bored: Spending years watching the same
movie would be enough to put you in an insane asylum, even the
White House maybe :) .
I predict that VR will have the same popular-participation feel
as netnews.
Winston Churchill's quote about how history would see WW II
comes to mind, in fact :)