Can anyone on this list supply me with an e-mail address for the US Board
of Trade, or details on their advertising standards? It hardly seems fair
that a commercial advertising company on the other side of the Atlantic can
take such cheap advertising advantage of non-commercial (European) ethnic
minority non-English language services as is described above.
 
This problem arises specifically out of commercial activity on the net by
the US consortium Tilenet and Walter Shelby Group, which set up a whole web
page dedicated to the GAELIC-L minority community services list without the
permission of the list owners. We have no problem with sites which sought
and gained our permission to make culturally-suitable links. We have
already written three times to the Shelby Group, asking them to remove
their unwanted commercial link to our site, but received no response (even
from their SALES address, which promises to process all queries within 24
hours).
 
To make matters worse, one of the pages at the offending site
<http://tile.net/lists/about.html> carries this uncompromising declaration
(can such a declaration actually be legal?): 'Please do not send us
requests for additions, corrections or deletions... If your list is
included in Tile.Net and you don't wish it to be, you must make your list
confidential to prevent it from appearing in list global...'
 
Because GAELIC-L is a (minority European) _community_ service we just
cannot make it confidential. Apart from being culturally inappropriate, the
unwanted Shelby web page sports a big button in the middle, which the
curious can click on to send mail straight to one of my addresses, thereby
making my listowner life a misery, by generating more US mail that I can
currently handle.  Changing my address is not an option, because Shelby is
linking my registered list-requests address.
 
We shall be very grateful to any list owner/maintainer who can advise us on
how to rid minority services such as ours of unwarranted intrusive links to
commercial sites such as Tilenet-Shelby.com, and how to guard against the
imposition non-owner approved advertising links in the future.
 
With best wishes,
Marion Gunn
 
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Marion Gunn
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