Hi Philip,

How dumb is that attitude, huh? "Don't publish my link, I don't want any new qualified traffic coming to my site!"

Idiots.

Anyway, the courts are in our favor on this one, or users wouldn't have Google or any other search engine/directory at the ready access.

The only slightly gray area can be deep linking with news sites, but even those have been overturned in the court system (note Google's recent success with its beta news).

This reminds me of a recent situation I came across in my job selling yellow page advertising for Verizon.

I had my assistant call all of my Providence accounts asking them if they had a website...and a couple of them said they did but they REFUSED to tell her what it was.

Come to find out they thought she meant email address--and about 10 or 15% didn't know the difference between an email address and a web address!

In my experience speaking with over 1,000 offline business owners and managers each year I have found even today there are a LOT of them who are still SERIOUSLY clueless about the Internet, and still many who barely or never go online...too busy running a business or putting out daily fires I guess.:-)

My best,

TLC