re printing jack previdi p psilink com writes in reply to dorothy heydt reminding us that advertising is not done on internet as a matter of fact d j it does make a difference almost a half million new users joined the internet last year many of them are commercial businesses the ban on commercial use of internet is no more jack there is a difference between using the network for commercial purposes and advertising in newsgroups business communication is okay advertising to hundreds of thousands of users around the planet who have no desire to receive advertising is not okay those of us who pay for internet access are constrained only by our innate good taste and no have no administrator to guide us i suspect that a site which generated a large volume of material not in anybody s good taste would find itself getting a lot of attention it didn t want you may belong to the public library but that doesn t mean you can deface the books disorder the stacks or disturb the other patrons you re constrained by the same rules that the rest of the users many academic and military who get irritable about a network for which they pay with tax and grant money carrying private business advertising follow there are secret masters here just like everywhere else they re not as obvious as the ones on prodigy but they re here no doubt at some point the internet like everything else will become grotty enough to carry advertising at that time i hope it is confined to its own newsgroups and not on discussion groups like misc writing elizabeth willey
