In the spirit - as well as the physical file structure - of the Web, there is a certain freedom to link to, bookmark, or copy other sites' images for personal use and convenience. Any document or file open to the world can be linked to directly, whether a logo or a weather radar map.
A Web server procedure employed by Intellicast, MSNBC's weather service, may be a sign that this freedom is on the wane.
The procedure, written with Netscape Server's software tools, is designed to accept only those universal resource locator requests originating at the address http://www.intellicast.com. All other URLs referred to Intellicast's image servers return only the "404 - file not found" message.
The individual documents that make up a Web page - images, ad banners, and buttons - all have unique resource locators to send a Web server to the proper directories to find files. For example, a weather radar map for the midwestern United States will have the URL www.intellicast.com/weather/pit/radar. This page is made up of many parts, including the Intellicast logo, an ad banner and a radar map. To get to the radar map, a user could, at one time, link directly to it. The URL would yield only the map and not the logo or the ad banner.
And so, with a slight tweak to the server software, webmasters at Intellicast shut out the latter Web image to the open world. Such server trickery vexes netizens like Jason Catlett, and may be a sign of future trends to come.
"URL stands for universal resource locator, but these URLs are not resources that can be universally located," said Catlett, chief executive of Junkbusters Corp., a company that develops a freeware filtering utility that helps people thwart the serving of ads and setting of cookies.
"It's violating one of the fundamental assumptions about how the Web works ... the 'commonwealth' of the Web is being Balkanized by conflicting commercial factions," said Catlett.
Axel Boldt, the author of WebFilter, agrees. "I wouldn't be too surprised if other sites whose prime offering is a certain image would do the same. Of course, if used on a grand scale, it could change Web culture quite a bit," Boldt said in an email to Wired News.
Intellicast doesn't believe information should be so free. The weather service is a subsidiary of Massachusetts-based WSI Corp., which gathers and sells weather data. WSI noticed that users were linking, or creating "virtual includes" to its weather radar maps, cropping off copyright information and corporate logos in the process.
More damaging was the realization that visitors were bypassing Intellicast's ad banners. "We are completely advertiser supported and our advertisers want to know that with each visit, we record an impression [an ad view]," said webmaster Jude LeBlanc.
Bill Mechanic, division manager of business development for Intellicast, said advertisers typically set goals for the number of impressions, or ad views, they want per month. For example, a computer firm in the Boston area wants their ads to appear 50,000 times in the month of April. This information is gathered by looking at server logs, which tell what pages, and subsequently, what ads, are projected.
Net surfers have their own reasons for skipping ads. The banners are merely one more large graphics file that a dial-up connection has to choke over in the process of download a Web page. Bypassing an ad or logo saves time. It also preserves privacy. Images on sites such as AltaVista, for example, also hide cookies from Web ad agency DoubleClick.
Programs such as WebFilter and Internet Junkbuster, a set of resources that route URL requests through proxy servers run by Internet service providers, are not affected by procedures like the one written by Intellicast.
Because many sites depend completely on ad revenue, the clamping down on freedom of access to nothing but the complete Web page, with banners intact, is going to be a fact of life, said Jeff Harrell, perhaps one of the biggest proponents of an ad-free Internet.
"The proprietor of a Web site should have a choice of how things are laid out on the site and how people will view them," said Harrell, a project coordinator for Pretty Good Privacy and co-founder of PrivNet, the developer of Internet FastForward, a program that was a filter against ads. "If I had a commercial site, I would want to make sure people don't have a free ride," he said.
