I find this interesting and would appreciate other points of view. Why
would anyone mind if someone else links to their site?? What harm
could it possibly cause? The article mentions the fact that
Ticketmaster is pissed at M$oft for putting a link to their site on a
M$soft entertainment page. This, to me, seems utterly harmless, makes
total sense, and would only serve to increase Ticketbastards revenues;
where's the prob? An excerpt:
Berners-Lee Defends Right to Hyperlink
By WARREN WILSON
c.1997 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
More serious, he said, are concerns about one of the Web's most
fundamental features, the hypertext ``links'' that connect one site to
another.
``The question, `May I have permission to link to your site?' has got
me really upset,'' said Berners-Lee, an Oxford-educated software
engineer who created the Web in 1989 at CERN, the European
Laboratory for Particle Physics. He is now at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where he directs the World Wide Web
Consortium, which coordinates development of the Web.
The consortium's neutrality policy prevented him from commenting on
specific companies, he said, or on a recent dispute in which
Ticketmaster challenged Microsoft Corp.'s right to link to
Ticketmaster sites from its entertainment-oriented sidewalk.com site.
The freedom to link one site to another shouldn't be open to question,
Berners-Lee said.
``You and I have a right to discuss something,'' he said, whether or
not
that something wants to be discussed.
``You don't have to ask someone's permission to talk about them,'' he
said.
[Jay]