Earthlink Wants Total Access (to Your PC)

By now the majority of neowins know about Earthlinks anti pop-up ad feature. However something is very wrong with this. Sure Earthlinks pop-up blocker will block pop-ups from www.bigboobies.com, but it generates its own pop-up ads for Earthlink, itself.

Everybody hates pop-ups -- you know, those extra ads that unexpectedly appear in new windows on top of or behind the window where you are surfing on almost every site except for PBS. Well maybe not EVERYBODY hates them. In a Jupiter-MediaMetrix survey last year, only 41 percent of respondents were against pop-ups, though if they had flipped the survey around and asked how many respondents LIKED pop-ups, my guess is the number would have been near zero. And even 41 percent is too many consumers to annoy at one sitting. So pop-ups are bad, which means that getting rid of them is a logical marketing scheme. That's the way it is, certainly, at AOL and Earthlink, the #1 and #3 U.S. Internet Service Providers ranked by number of subscribers. Why, then, are lots of Earthlink users annoyed with that company's anti-pop-up technology? Because it is insidious, intrusive, and manipulative. In short, Earthlink's war against pop-ups is for many users worse than the problem it purports to solve.

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