The ubiquity of intrusive, inappropriate, and unheeded advertisements throughout the Internet experience — from banner ads, to pop-up ads, to spam — must be stopped.

• Nearly every form of advertising on the Internet has an extremely brief period of success, followed by an eternity of being all but completely ignored by nearly all Internet users. The click through rates for most Internet advertising (the number of users who see the ad and actually follow its links) hovers below 1%.
• The lack of efficiency of Internet advertising makes it a waste of bandwidth, time, effort and money — all of which could be put to much better use.
• Either some morons out there are actually responding to these adds — in which case they are to blame for the preliferation of crap on the Internet — or the marketing gurus are lying to businesses by telling them these ads are at all effective, in which case they should be held accountable.
• Obviously, there are ways to offer content and services on the Internet that are not bogged down with ineffective and annoying advertisements, since many companies do precisely that.
• "Targeted" advertising — advertisements that rely on gathering users' information to "tailor" the advertisement to their wants and needs — provides companies with your user information. With all the Internet fraud being committed these days, do you really want to trust most of these online marketers?
• The most egregious and damnable example of intrusive and ineffective advertising on the Internet is the proliferation of unsolicited pornographic spam. As we can personally attest, the purveyors of such advertising are not at all careful about who receives such e-mails — children of our acquaintance who are under the age of 10 have received these. Such careless disregard must be punished; this is an instance where government regulation and intervention is undeniably called for.