Interesting little one this, its nothing new that anti adware applications and things like norton block some networks ads etc but i was in a public library in some god forsaken place ( northampton so the sign said) and it did not allow access at all to the tradedoubler domain.

Being the inquisitive sod i am i had a little poke around as much as the "high tech" consultancy software companies efforts would let me to see that the machine were basically using a proxy service to a company that provide the libraries internet access infrastructure

To cut it short, company, bollox, dumb, idiots in whatever combination you like.

Obviously i checked a few pages which i knew had tradedoubler served ads and nothing, links not working etc as i presumed. That lead me to thinking about how many seriously large firms that use these kind of proxy filters or gateways, i know of at least 20 to 30 firms in my seamingly small existence, probably totalling around 10,000 to 20,000 people between them.

Then when i troubled myself some more i realised that these 10,000 to 20,000 people are probably in the top 20% of all internet shoppers, disposable incomes beyond the average, little or no time outside of work to shop (commuting etc) internet at the disposal (though what access they have i dont know).

Thats an awful lot of business to be loosing out on i would of thought, anyone else find they cant access tradedoubler through other networks? What happens if a company like AOL decided to block what it would like to add as a parental filter in exchange for launching its own services? What if internet explorer came bundled with this stuff. I know there is always ways round it, like not serve your ads using the same domain, but with systems designed upwards based on a domain name, that could be quite tricky and costly for some of these networks.