Friday, March 15, 2013

Pretending info – doing unethical competition

Advertising by the means of media does cost money. That’s why some companies have changed to running media themselves to reduce costs. The internet makes it possible for a company’s own website to be as accessible as professional media. It can give general information to keep people looking it up via Google search results etc. Nothing wrong with that – so far!
But people are being deceived when links on a website pretending to give general information are denoted wrong. The person viewing that website might think by the denotation of a link, clicking it would lead to the business’ website indicated there, unless he first checked the lower left of his browser showing the real url when hovering with the cursor over a link. That’s the only way people can protect themselves against deception on dubious websites. But more severe is the search engines’ assigning the keywords words used for the name of that company with the link it has been assigned with by the programmer of that site with their indexed search results, leading to deception by the search engine results – just as they have been “designated by the deceptor”. Company names are trademarks not allowed to be abused for unethical competition. It is legal to include the names of competing companies on one’s own website to show prospective customers what alternatives there are. Giving them as links that do not lead to the right websites, but one’s own or one is associated with is not only unethical, hijacking internet traffic by deception, stealing customers by hijacking, is definitely illegal. But what does a person mind, who claims to be educated in laws?


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