The Internet: Commercial Web Sites

Before the turn of the century, the Internet was still a place where one could participate in the open, free and unhindered distribution of information and knowledge. I emailed a search engine with keywords pertaining to my subject of interest. Back would come a list of HTML hyperlinks to sites containing the kind of information I was looking for. The sites presented their information in a clear unpretentious manner. And all was well. But this was soon to change.

Gaudy Presentation

Now, I enter the address of a site I think may contain information I am looking for. The server is found and contacted. Then I wait as if forever and a day for its home page to download. I see a screen full of blank rectangles of all sizes, like an infantile attempt at a Matisse. Gradually — over time — over a long time — these rectangles fill with gaudy images. Nothing much recognisable from the real world: just a confusing cacophony of colour in the form of all kinds of pointless logos, buttons and widgets.

Having waited so long for it all to appear, I must now embark on an intense learning curve. I must try to figure out how the particular designer of this particular page intended it to be used — assuming he ever gave a moment's thought as to how anybody but himself should use it. Sometimes my learning curve is a matter of working out which blotches of colour are link buttons and which are just there as a result of the graphic artist engaging in self-gratifying indulgence.

Some web sites play a game with their visitors. It's called 'find the hot spot'. Somewhere within the blaze of colour is a little place where the cursor changes into a hand. To proceed onwards towards a page which hopefully contains some useful information, the visitor must scan the whole page to find the hot spot and then click it. All this would be fine in the right place, namely a child's play station: but not on the Internet.

Finally, assuming I have not by now given up and hit my browser's 'stop' button, I get through to a page with writing on it. But here comes another frustration. I have to squint at microscopic print on a dazzling brilliant white background. The trouble is, I don't know where to start. There's no main body of text. It's all here a little, there a little in disconnected areas, like an arbitrary pick'n'mix of the infamous Tony Blair sound bites.

I carefully position my reading glasses between my VDU glasses and the screen. Great! I can just make out the pale yellow words on the puke-coloured widget. No, it wasn't what I was looking for. Do I really want to continue. No. I try another site, despite the excessive investment in time and effort I have already made getting this far.

The Internet is a revolutionary and immensely powerful piece of technology for the purpose for which it was originally designed and intended, namely the free universal exchange of knowledge and information of all kinds. But it seems that where technology provides a way, commercially-driven fashion destroys it.

Consider the Hypertext Mark-up Language [HTML]. In its original form it provided the perfect way of presenting information on the Internet. It allowed the web author to determine how a page should be laid out in logical rather than physical terms. It allowed the author to say what was normal text, what was emphasised text and what was a heading. But it left the reader, through his default browser settings, to determine how this would be interpreted in terms of type size, type face and type style. A young reader with 20-20 vision was thus free to set a small crisp type face. An older reader with fading focus was equally free to set his browser to a large bold type face. All were provided for. They provided for themselves. But not any more. As far as modern web sites are concerned, such freedom is history.

This freedom of choice has been all but killed by you-know-who's web-building tools which automatically convert word processor output directly into 'HTML'. But their HTML is an extended form. It allows the author to set the physical size, colour and layout of web pages. It forcibly overrides whatever I set my browser to display. If that is what the web author decides then I have to put up with microscopic print on a dazzling white background — whether or not I like it or can even read it.

The modern web author's customer has been persuaded that unless his web site is a gaudy morass of graphic arts wank then it will be perceived as 'amateurish' and consequently not get the 'hits'. The gaudy norm can therefore, in a sense, be said to be what commercial customers want. It is what they have been persuaded to think looks 'professional'. The question is: is the gaudy norm what the web site visitor — the customer's customer — wants? Who knows? He too has probably been induced to believe that this is what a 'professional' web site looks like. I certainly don't.

Logical Paradox

Now, in the year 2026, I am 84 years old. All my life I have been a programmer. I still write sizeable programs in C and Java. Yet I find most websites to be an irksome challenge. Like bureaucracy, they do not seem to be at all logical to me. Am I missing something? I looked into this apparent paradox.

I discovered that yes, I am correct. Unlike my own non-commercial intellectual website, the functionality & behaviour of a commercial website indeed is not logical. It has a completely different design philosophy. My website is designed logically to inform; whereas a commercial website is designed illogically, according to the dictates of behavioural psychology, to capture and hold the attention of the customer, using time-wasting tasks to maximise his stay on the site, plus deliberately engineered heavily biased decision options to railroad him into doing what the website owner wants him to do rather than what he himself wants to do.

Customer Control

In other words, the prime directive of the commercial website is customer control and conversion. And customers are emotionally driven: not logically driven.

The commercial website designer is legally required to provide all the logical functionality necessary for his victim to be able to navigate the site. And he must always provide his victim the choice of being able to exit from any situation she may end up in should she decide not to go ahead with a commitment or purchase. This he does.

However, he wants to control what she does in order to ensure that she does end up making a purchase rather than merely browsing through then exiting the site. He must make it as easy as possible to follow the route to a purchase, while making it as difficult as he dares for her to just bail out without buying anything.

For this purpose, he implements a JavaScript program, which runs within her browser, that creates what is called a "dark pattern". With this he deliberately obscures all the logical decision paths that he doesn't want her to go down [but which factually are all still there], leaving the path he does want her to take — the path to a purchase — well illuminated with bold enticing eye-candy. So onward she clicks, like a sheep to the slaughter. And in roll his profits.

Yet "dark patterns" are nasty but tolerable. In any society based on Neo-liberal Capitalism, the individual simply has to accept that he lives in a socio-economy within which business and commerce are intrinsically predatory. Consequently, he must forever keep in mind the old adage caveat emptor [let the buyer beware]. For this, the commercial website, as described above, must always be seen as a devious salesman, nothing worse.

Corporate Mischief

But commercial website development didn't stop there. It descended into a level of customer manipulation and deceit that I openly declare to be wholly unacceptable. Commercial websites now download into my browser and run on my computer, programs used to manipulate me and corral me into legal traps that covertly bind me to contracts for services and purchases to which I did not consciously agree.

My first example is the airline booking website. This would appear to use, or at least mimic the effect of, 'dynamic pricing' & 'fake scarcity' algorithms to scare me into a panic purchase. From my point of view, it seems that an embedded 'dynamic pricing' algorithm increases the price of my ticket iteratively. This it does both on a timer and also if I backtrack from a 'return flight' page to a previous 'outbound flight' page in order to re-check details. After each iteration, I am straitly warned that there are fewer and fewer seats still available, which I suspect is a complete lie.

The 'innocent' reason returned for this apparent behaviour is that, while I am booking the flight, the airline booking system places a temporary hold on a seat for me. This makes the number of available seats diminish by one. With multiple customers booking flights, the total number of seats being temporarily held increases significantly. Hence the apparent 'fake scarcity', which 'somehow' automatically increases the seat prices.

I am reluctant to believe this, especially since I book flights between 6 and 3 months in advance. So there is no cause for rapidly churning prices and seat availabilities for two reasons:

Firstly, the airline does not have to put up seat prices simply because they are being booked rapidly, especially since to do so is extremely disconcerting for the customer. It makes me feel vulnerable because it gives me a strong impression that the booking system is inherently unstable. Secondly, if I back-track to check the previous selections that I made, the airline server knows full well that it is still me — still the same browser session. So it has no reason to count my back-tracking to a previous page as a new booking session from a new customer.

I myself would certainly be able to design a booking system that gave the website user a stable working environment in which to systematically construct his route and buy his ticket in a passive relaxed manner without stress.

But the reality leaves me not knowing where the price is going to end up or how many seconds I have left before all the seats are gone. It gives me an acute sense of arbitrary instability and little confidence in the airline booking system. I have kept putting off going to visit my children each time for 7 years so far because of this. Airline booking sites are an absolute nightmare for me to use.

My second example is Internet Service Providers [ISPs]. Their sites have a particularly advanced level of "dark pattern" functionality. For instance, I have many times had to report faults and disruptions to service. In each case I always end up being unwillingly routed into a sales page within which I am pestered into believing that the solution is to move to a more expensive plan.

Telephoning them works no better. The humanly operated answering service never answers and I am inevitably diverted to a pre-recorded phone menu, which runs me round in circles until again, I end up in a section that only deals with upgrading to a more expensive plan: absolutely unrelated to the reason for my call.

In any case, what if I do buy or upgrade to a new plan? All I want is an Internet connection. But I can't merely subscribe to an Internet connection alone. I am forced to choose one of their standard plans, the cheapest of which includes all kinds of additional services that I don't want, don't need, can't use, and in one case doesn't even work. This is called a Venda Casada [Married Sale] and is illegal. But I still have to accept it. I do not have the stamina or resources to enter into yet another battle with an ISP to get something to which I am legally entitled. And they know that, for most people, the situation is the same. So, in effect, they have impunity by default.

Day of The Dickover

As I am given to understand, a "dickover" is a colloquial term coined by a technical writer called John Gruber in May 2026. It refers to a splash-style dialogue box, which covers the entire browser window, giving the user Hobson's choice [no choice] about proceeding along the route to what the website owner wants him to do, irrespective of whatever the user [victim] himself may wish to do. It inevitably forces the victim along the path to making a costly unwanted purchase.

I remember one "dickover" in particular. I wanted a PDF reader on my phone. My ISP was TIM. I found one on Google Play and proceeded with the download. During the installation process, a "dickover" appeared that required me to authorise not only the purchase of the PDF reader but also a whole host of other things that were totally useless for me.

There was no CANCEL button and no 'X' visible anywhere to bail out of the situation. The "dickover" had also hidden and disabled the standard BACK button and both ESCAPE buttons. In the end, my only solution was to take the battery out of my phone, wait, then re-insert the battery and re-start my phone. I don't try to read PDFs on my phone any more: I transfer them to my Linux computer. I can't read the stupidly small PDF presentations on my phone screen anyway.

I encountered another "dickover" when I was considering signing up with another ISP called 'Blink'. Having no Internet connection at the time, the only way possible for me to do this was via my smartphone. Notwithstanding, before signing up, I wanted to read Blink's contract + terms and conditions. In my attempt to do this, I was inevitably railroaded into the "dickover" sign-up page, which covered my entire smartphone screen. On it were buttons to SIGN-UP and CANCEL, plus links to the contract + terms and conditions. My phone was in my left hand. I was about to touch the 'contract' link with my right index finger. Before I could do this, however, my left thumb grazed the very edge of the phone screen. Thereupon, I was thanked for signing up to the new service.

But fortunately, a warning screen from my Firefox browser appeared saying that Blink's website did not have a valid certificate because the certificate it presented was out of date. So the browser had held back my 'unauthorised' acceptance of the contract. The warning screen said that it was risky for me to proceed and that I should bail out, which I did. I heard nothing further from Blink except a phone call [from a human!] to ask why I hadn't signed up. It appears that, with Blink at least, one has to sign up before one can have sight of the contract to which one has already signed up. Blink was now well and truly off my list.

I later bought a new Samsung A25 phone and then signed up with the service provider TIM. TIM, so it would appear to me, is the aficionado of what I would call the "semi-dickover", which is far more dangerous than the full version. This is because TIM places them on the screen of the phone with the screen lit but with me not signed in to the phone. There is one semi-dickover that TIM uses to simply say that the network does not provide time and date information and that I must go to the phone's SETTINGS function to set time & date.

This is despite the fact that I never take my phone outside my apartment and consequently it gets Internet time and date information from my home Wi-Fi.

But TIM's second semi-dickover is much more dangerous. It offers me an upgrade [for a larger monthly data transfer or other additional service] — for an extra monthly charge, of course. It sits there on the illuminated screen when I am not signed into my phone. But it is live nevertheless. If I unintentionally touch the OK button, I will thereby be deemed to have signed up for the service upgrade about which I know nothing and which I do not want. And I am already having to pay every month for lots of costly unwanted add-ons as it is.

This particular semi-dickover continually refreshes itself to stop the screen from switching off to avoid draining the battery unnecessarily. It thereby forces me to have to re-charge frequently, which drastically reduces battery life. Apart from this, I have to make sure I remember to look carefully at my phone before I pick it up. If, although I'm not signed in, I inadvertently touch or graze the OK button, I am deemed to have signed up for the offered upgrade.

My necessary solution is to keep my phone strictly switched off except when I actually need to use it. Thus my phone is off most of the time, which, I would surmise, is opposite to TIM's intentions. Besides, keeping my phone switched off avoids my work being disrupted by the incessant torrent of commercial nuisance calls, a large proportion of which are from TIM itself.

Suppose I were to fall victim to one of their "dickover" traps by inad­vertently and unconsciously signing up for a service upgrade. I could refuse to pay. However, as with most payment systems today, I only have the options of paying all or nothing. There is no provision for making a part payment. So, by right, I am not morally obliged to pay anything. After all, I would be happy to pay for the service I want. But the fact that I cannot do this is entirely TIM's doing, not mine. So the fault, that they receive nothing at all, rests entirely with them.

Notwithstanding, if I do not pay, and pay the full amount, TIM will enter my name on the Serasa Experian website of bad debtors. This will flag me publicly as a financial persona non grata throughout Brazil, with all the consequential prejudices that precipitates. But I cannot bring TIM to book for its "dickover" mischief.

This is because, over and above all other law is the law: argumentum ad baculum, which essentially translates as 'Might is Right'. TIM is a vast corporation and has access to place me, a lowly individual, on a nationally visible name-and-shame list of bad debtors. I do not have the power or resources to do the same with TIM. In other words, the parties involved are of vastly unequal power and the situation is non-reversible.

Thus, Serasa Experian becomes, in effect, an 'instrument of extortion' for use exclusively by the rich and corporate with total impunity. If justice could be done, of course, Serasa Experian could be sued for tort of defamation of my person and character because it is publicly naming and shaming me falsely for a debt I do not rightly owe. The fact that TIM has not received the money due is entirely its own fault because it left me with no means to pay only for the services it had properly rendered.

Of course, the aggressive letter I receive from Serasa Experian will ask me the obviously-loaded question of when and how I propose to pay the full charged amount + a fine and additional processing costs, under the erroneous presumption that it is I who am in the wrong. They then forcibly externalise onto me, a lone 84 year old isolated individual, the significant amount of time and considerable physical and mental stress of expediting the task of extricating myself from a predicament that was not of my making. This thankless task requires me to battle with the incomprehensible websites of the government consumer protection agency and the telecom watchdog, after which I would probably have to endure a court process.

Whether I would win the case against me or not, I simply don't know. Merely being morally in the right does not guarantee anything. I have never gone through this with TIM. I simply keep on paying for both the services I need [basic cell phone service] plus the services I don't want but am forced to pay for [film streaming, e-book, e-news stand, store discount cards, security services and other add-ons that I don't even understand].

I think most people accept that they have to do this. However, I did go through the process in the past with an ISP called NET, which ended up with NET having to reimburse me with double what they had overcharged. But this was simply not worth the time and stress I was put through. I wouldn't do it again.

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In my opinion, air travel and Internet services are now a part of the global social infrastructure of humanity, in which no individual should be subjected to such deliberate devious and damaging trickery. It proves beyond all doubt that custody of public infrastructure should never on any account be entrusted to private interests. They have neither adequate moral fibre nor the systemic fitness for purpose.

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© 1999 & 2026 Robert John Morton