So it's just a few lines, right Duane?

It's the camel in the tent.  This is the voice of experience.

At some point we will have to draw a line in the sand.  Might as well
try to do it now.

You can't allow some commercials and not others.  You have to be
consistent.  I have bent the rules of our lists by not dumping my
hotmail and juno subscribers because my constituents are people with
severe disabilities and some have very low incomes.  When we get more of
a budget, I may use the part of it to offer to pay for $20/month servers
for the indigent among my subscribers who for years have relied on juno.

What it is is the increase in the costs of the product to the consumer.
It was, at first, zero price and zero cost.  Now it is not zero cost,
because the subscribers do not have the choice to turn off the ads.  So
it's no longer sharing-the-benefits-of-internet, a good deed; it's
charity with the embarassment of having to be a walking billboard.

Let me give you an example:
There is a website that once offered small, free websites, if you were
willing to accept a banner.  At first, they assured customers that it
would only be banners appropriate for the subject of the website.  There
were several pages created on this website for support groups.  The
website had a great reputation; this was good warm and fuzzy
advertisement.

Recently I went to that website to check out a link, and the banner that
went with a support group's page was advertising something that involved
five rather "hot" looking babes.  I did not check it out to see what
they were advertising - whatever it was, it was pretty tacky for a small
support group for people with a specific disability (that mostly affects
women) to have to accept.  More than a little embarassing for them.  Far
worse, however, was the practice the website has now adopted of
including an attachment that opens when Netscape goes to the page; a
practice that completely violates the rules of safe computing.  I am
currently in the process of moving an organization's webpages from that
website to a site that I own, where I am giving them space for free.
Really for free, no strings attached, because the purpose of the site is
to help spread information about our disease and sources of support.

When my organization, WECAN, the Worldwide Electronic CFIDS/M.E. Action
Network, first looked at putting up a webpage, one of our members was
enthusiastic about the free sites available from this source.  The other
members of the website committee looked at them, and decided this was
not an option -- because of the banners.  "Oh, but the banners are
tame.  Nothing racy, or offensive, or intrusive."  That was indeed true
-- a little over a year ago.  It is no longer true.  Camel and the tent.

Fortunately, another member in the UK had access to a totally free site
for social and community awareness, which became the main location for
our webpage until we procured our own domain.

Camel and the tent.  Seen it before.  Don't like it much.

Mary Schweitzer
WECAN:  http://www.cfids-me.org/wecan/