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 -- Marion Gunn [log in to unmask]