Wired:Strange things are afoot in Texas - or at least on the Texas internet. Subscribers to Redmoon, a local internet service provider (ISP), found themselves battling more than their share of internet adverts in the last few weeks, writes Danny O'Brien
It seems that not just the usual commercial websites were displaying messages from their sponsors: every website that ended in a .com was showering web surfers with distracting and annoying pop-up ads, all from a company calling itself "Fair Eagle".
What was peculiar was that visitors who used other ISPs saw none of these new banners and the users themselves weren't infected with any form of virus or ad-propagating malware. (Malware (malicious software) is designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner's informed consent.)
It was their own ISP that was adding the promotions to the mix and getting a cut of the action, too.
Let's pick that apart a little because, at the best of times, it can often be hard to tell what is coming from where on the internet.
Customers who pay Redmoon for their connection (like you might pay AOL for your dial-up or Eircom for broadband) were visiting websites on their browser and then having the replies from those websites intercepted en route by servers at Redmoon, which inserted Fair Eagle's ads seamlessly into the flow of data before relaying them to their subscribers with ad-bearing modifications.
To me, that's a little like the local postman opening your letters and dropping in a leaflet or two from his friends, or your phone company dropping into your call to announce some great new bargains.
One has to be careful with analogies though. I'm sure the ISP involved would claim it was much more like delivering some "bulk mail" along with your first-class mail: an established practice with the US post office.
They might also point out that you are perfectly free to choose another company if you did not like the ads you were being compelled to see.
The real question is: where will this end? There is no direct precedent for this amount of interference by the middlemen of the net. Some ISPs will filter and discard spam or virus attacks, but very few of them directly profit from such meddling in this way.
Usually, the end result is judged less by past behaviour and more by which corporation wins in a legal fight (or a settlement).
My own feeling is that it's unlikely that Fair Eagle or this Texas ISP would survive the first large website that decided having ads plastered over it was appropriate and made to sue.
But then, with the slight modification to this business plan, whereby the original website agreed to such extras, such added-extra boxes in ISPs might well get the go ahead from the original websites.
However, no matter what deals are cut between ISP and the advertisement provider, it doesn't seem in the spirit of the net to have every potential intermediary online have a right to add its own data to your online conversations.
In fact, the internet was designed and relies upon a minimal amount of messing with the data flow by intermediaries. After all, many of your internet data packets get sent over a dozen or more separate companies and computers as they traverse the net. Because of the huge and diverse variety of data communicated by online applications, tweaking that data even a tiny bit en route can have unforeseen consequences.
If all of those dozens of middle-men organisations start separately messing with your chatter, it could quickly reach the point where very little legible would reach the other end. The net could descend into a badly-played game of Chinese whispers. What's missing is any place for the end-user in this legal (and commercial) debate.
Redmoon's customers, as far as I am aware, can't turn off the ad insertion (except by adding their own anti-advertisement filters, such as Firefox's adblocker software or AdMuncher for Internet Explorer).
Perhaps they could move to other ISPs, but perhaps, too, their current ISP was being deceptive when it says that it was offering "internet service". Whatever this mangling of data is, it's certainly not a clean net connection.
Messing with user's data isn't just a violation of the net's expectations and of its technological basis. In the US at least, there's a strong argument that such deep inspection of your private communications are prohibited under privacy laws - and the same may be true under EU communication law.
That's because, to add adverts to a stream of web traffic, you need to pry within and monitor the contents of the existing traffic first.
Whether it's done by human or machine, that's surveillance of a private message and unless you have a very good reason to do it, that's against the law in most countries.
I'm not sure that "making some money on the side with some cushy ad deals" would cut it, frankly.
Anybody considering taking their cue from this Texan ISP might be wiser to listen to that great state's motto: "Don't mess with Texas" - and don't mess with your customer's private net conversations.
