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ISPs Behaving Like Spyware
If you're not using these snooping / adserving services, you might want to advertise the fact.
If you do choose to use them, you'll also need to inform your users, but if you're WideOpenWest (WOW!), you will try to avoid informing them, according to a Register article snarkily titled Data pimping catches ISP on the hop.
The issue is that even novice users will notice that Google is loading slowly (and when that happens, even the Bells have to stand down, we argued in Editorial: The Fight the Bells Will Lose).
You really don't want to do what WOW! did: have customer service deny that monitoring is going on and have the user try to eliminate spyware on their machine, only to later admit that in fact, it's the ISP doing the spyware-like behavior.
You don't want to have your VP of marketing deny that the system leaves cookies on user's machines when the ad system's website admits that cookies are a part of the system.
The system described in the article, NebuAD (see ATM for ISPs or Spy in a Box?), appears to be poorly designed, but is it any better than the competition? The article says ISPs can get systems from the following companies: Adzilla (see The Adzilla Project), Front Porch (industry veteran!), Phorm (see the Register coverage here), and a new entrant from Alcatel-Lucent, Project Rialto.
That's a lot of snooping being sold to ISPs. Will any be implemented right?
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