Unsolicited Ads

[Hector Mandel <mandel@oxbox.cso.uiuc.edu>]

Robert Holloway writes:

>  I know that the Internet has a long tradition of excluding
> advertising and in fact not only that but of providing many products
> such as software, free of charge.  It is curious to me that the profit 

> motive is so distrusted by the Internet tradition.  I think that it is
> partly an ideological stance based on the background and work 

> environment of most of the original users.  


The exclusion of advertising from the internet is not a "tradition".  In fact,  
it was, until recently, prohibited by the government agencies that provided the  
funding that made the internet possible.  The prohibition against unsolicited  
ads in RADSAFE has nothing to do with distrust of the profit motive or  
ideological factors.  It is based on our desire to keep the signal-to-noise  
ratio as high as possible.  Those of us who operate the RADSAFE list consider  
unsolicited advertisements as noise.  There is nothing keeping someone else  
from starting up another listserver and allowing ads.  I imagine that if  
someone were to do that, however, they would quickly come to the conclusion  
that they should be compensated for their time and resources by the  
advertisers.  There is nothing wrong with that; it just happens to be something  
that we cannot do here as long as we use University resources to make RADSAFE  
possible.  The RADSAFE mailing list is, in a way, a very inexpensive public  
service of the University of Illinois.

> But the use of the Internet 

> is going far beyond the original users and I would be willing to bet 

> that within 3 years, advertising here will be widely accepted.  Is it 

> 


Advertising on the internet is already widely accepted.  It just isn't  
acceptable on the RADSAFE mailing list.

---
      Hector Mandel, OCCSS Manager of Systems Services  | (217) 244-7237
      Computing and Communications Services Office      | h-mandel@uiuc.edu
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