Who pays for the advertising?
You want to advertise your business. You are paying an Internet Service Provider (ISP), or perhaps AOL or Compuserve, to give you access to the Internet. If you have organized your access in a businesslike manner, you may be spending $70 per month. If you are AT&T’s web site, you may be spending $10,000 per month for your access. So then, you are paying for the privilege of advertising, right? Well… You are one user at your ISP. You are paying a share of the distributed subscriber costs for your ISP’s connection to the Internet. But, so is everyone else with your ISP. So, effectively, you are helping to subsidize, with a very small relative contribution, the access of everyone else at your ISP. So far, so good. But, you are not paying one cent to the ISP next door, so they have to charge their customers for the full expenses of the connection. If you send out an ad, the ISP next door has to have storage space for it because it is currently impossible to selectively exclude ads. That
