didn’t mean to cause any offense… Let me clarify what I mean.

Firstly, I agree that the way advertising is currently formulated and delivered is largely wasteful. The statistic that >99% of web users don’t click on ads is almost empirical proof of that. However, I don’t think it has to be like that… I think, if certain forces were brought to bear, over time, advertising could become more responsive and more relevant to each individual user. But, the client-server paradigm of the web does not lend itself to this eventuality.

Making distinctions between Connectivity, Communications and Transactions may seem pointless or esoteric to you, but making these classifications is actually about the ‘deconstruction’ of the forces at work on the internet, and I sincerely believe that this is necessary.

Contrary to what you say; in fact you can not have ‘communication’ without ‘connectivity’, so the latter is indeed more fundamental; as long as you agree with the definition being that fundamentality in this discussion is about which ‘enables’ the other. If you as ‘the reader’ don’t want to (for the sake of that discussion) agree to this definition, then any ongoing discussion will be pointless.

The internet is point-to-point communication, just ask Van Jacobson.

You seem to assume that I mean “Web” when I don’t, and then call me out on it. Also, how is that a double proposition? You don’t say, likely because it isn’t one. Unless I’m in a local network, all the hardware between me and Joe Peer is privatized. The internet backbone is obviously way more than the Web, and it’s obviously privatized.

Advertising is waste. Advertising doesn’t have to be so lame? Right! It doesn’t have to be! It’s trying to get us to waste our attention, and often, our money. That’s the fundamental principle of all “underlying forces and reasons.” Advertisements are counter-beneficial to users.

We need to take the communication commons, but advertising is certainly not the only reason we need the commons. Undoubtedly there is some fuzziness to the concept of the advertisement, because a friend telling me about a product might be considered an advertisement. However, having viral marketing be the most prominent form of “ad” would certainly be an improvement over today.

Really, though, it’s the last two paragraphs of your comment that blow me away. You don’t have a concrete criticism or point so you just attempt to paint me as ignorant. Then again, that tells me you’re not interested in discussing ideas; I accidentally hit your “hot-button,” and your knee jerked.

#2 ~ The other hot-button that popped out of the text for me was the double proposition of:

“Right now, we have an arms race between what a person wants to pay attention to and what someone else wants them to pay attention to.

and within the same paragraph:

That arms race continues because the communication lines are privatized.

This is right on my desired ’cause célèbre’ at the moment and that is trying to get people to see the difference between ‘Communication’ and ‘Connectivity’ within the internet context. – Or to paraphrase that; between the Web & the Internet. Its the client-server system of the Web that has become effectively ‘privatized’, and these are the “communication lines” to which Stan refers. The client-server system of the Web has been infected with the ubiquitous scourge of mass poorly targeted, mostly remnant, ad-inventory. (a ‘remnant-ad’ is a web ad that nobody really cares about that gets fired off indiscriminately to publisher websites, by an ad-exchange or ad-network to fill someone’s meaningless quota)

Its widely known, within ad-circles that more tan 99% of web-users don’t click on ads (based on double-click data), so ‘the people’ have spoken… but the system goes on. An immediate solution for Stan might be Adblock,for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10) being downloaded by >300K users per month.

A broader solution will take time, but some smart people are working on it. 😉