The news coming out of Washington regarding net neutrality falls anywhere from lamentable to despairing, but let's face it: the internet has been the victim of commercial corruption for a long time. Obviously, blogs have to pay for themselves, and membership contributions just don't bring in significant amounts of money. The blogs are like non-profit arts organizations; ticket sales and membership dues cover only a portion of the costs. Program advertisement helps, and more important still are grants from foundations, governments, and corporations. Since most blogs are organized as profit making businesses, only corporate donations make a significant dent in the budget. That's probably why at this moment on The Agonist I'm looking at Mickey Mouse out of the corner of my eye, beckoning me to Disney World.

These type of static ads that just sit there off to the side of the page, or that are embedded in the top post, are probably the least intrusive type of advertising on the internet. I don't find them objectionable and they neither interrupt my flow of reading nor make The Agonist less enjoyable. But there are plenty of other blogs and websites that are becoming unreadable because of the way advertising is forced upon you when you click on. Here is my list of complaints, in ascending order of distaste.

The Pop-Up Ad - I come across relatively few of these; maybe they've been outlawed in the US somehow. The ad shows up in the middle of the screen the minute you go to the website, and you have to click it off in order to proceed to the website.

The Pop-Down Ad - These are much more frequent. They pop down underneath the website the minute you call it up. You don't know they are there until you leave the website, and they can't be removed until you click them off. Netflix seems especially fond of using these annoyances.

The Click Off Button That Doesn't Work - You hit the x box on the upper right corner of the ad, but nothing happens. Then you have to wait a few seconds and try again, or search out some statement on the ad in small print that allows you to remove the ad.

The Useless Backspace Button - Some ads seem to inactivate your backspace function. This happens also on a few websites; you can't exit the page through the backspace, so you must close the website altogether and pull up all over again whatever you were previously looking at.

The Scroll Down Ad - You enter the website and an ad at the top of the page quickly engorges itself, causing the website itself to virtually disappear from your screen. Your only choice is to wait a few seconds for the ad to shrink back to normal size, or bring your cursor over to the right and use the scroll bar to find the website you thought you had entered. This is often problematic because by the time you've moved the scroll bar, the ad has shrunk and you have to move back up again. This is in the very annoying category.

Way Too Many Ads - HuffPost has this problem, along with too many embedded photos and videos. It takes much longer for the average computer to pull up the website.

The Blinking Ad - It just sits there and blinks incessantly. It takes a little bit more doing to ignore these ads, and you are often tempted to scroll past that point on the page to get rid of the distraction.

The Highly Sensitive Scroll-Over - Maybe it's my computer, which is getting to be about four years old, but I find more ads that suddenly turn into full pages merely by accidentally scrolling over them with your cursor. Now you have to exit the entire page to get back to your website.

The Black Screen - When you click on the website, the text part that you want to read quickly turns black or is covered by a heavy shadow, making it unreadable. An ad immediately pops up taking over almost the whole page. Sometimes it is a video commercial, but in any case you have to wait 15 or so seconds before it disappears and leads you back to the website. Or, you can find the statement that says get me to the website now. Online magazines are fond of this approach, used by The Atlantic Monthly for all of its columnists. We are definitely into the beyond annoying category with these ads.

The Forced Television Commercial - You are required to watch a 30 second video before the video or website you called up will be released to you. Initially, these ads had escape routes you could activate, but more and more of them are requiring you to sit through the entire advertisement. This is bad enough when you are expecting a video to show up, but it gets extremely frustrating in websites such as weather.com, which requires you to see a half-minute commercial before they will show you your local weather.

The Forced Television Commercial With Sound - The commercial activates both your video card and your sound card. This is not good when you are surfing the internet at midnight and your SO is sleeping next to you. In fact, it is not good at any time, because the ads tend to be pitched louder than normal videos.

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These last two examples are my most detested advertising, but well before I get to these, I am at the point where I leave the website and don't bother waiting for the ad to finish, or I don't even bother to turn it off. I leave because the website usually isn't worth the hassle, and because I object to being forced to do something against my will. The other reason I leave is because of the cumulative effect of these ads. In a 30 minute surfing session on the internet, you may have to spend five minutes watching advertisements depending on what you are calling up, and the more popular the website, the more obtrusive and obnoxious the advertising. Maybe that's a function of expense: the cost of running something like HuffingtonPost necessitates elaborate, annoying advertising ruses. Still, there has to be some point of diminishing returns for the website and the advertiser, where too many eyes are not bothering to get to the website because of all the advertising gatekeepers.

Unfortunately, we don't seem to be at that point of diminishing returns. The advertising gimmicks are getting more elaborate and obnoxious, all for the purpose of forcing your eyes and your mind to focus on the product pitch. This is definitely heading to the point where the internet becomes unpleasant because it is overloaded with overbearing, gimmickry ads. On some days, I feel we are there already.