You are the weakest link

If I told you that there was a really cool page somewhere on the BBC website, would you rather I pointed you to www.bbc.co.uk and let you mouse around until you found it, or gave you the address of the page I was talking about?

If you said anything but the page itself then please go and read something else, because you won't like what's coming up.

Recently there has been a debate raging over the ethics (and legality) of what has come to be known as 'deep linking' where, instead of a link pointing to the home or front page of a website it is, instead, pointed to the most relevant section, no matter how deeply buried within the site structure it may be.

From the web user's point of view, it is far more sensible if the site I am browsing (or even the homepage I am creating) uses hyperlinks to specific rather than front pages.

For marketing people, however, and those who are desperate to preserve their online 'brand', logic seems to dictate that it would be better if the casual browser was always pointed at the homepage; the top level of the site.

But surely this is madness? It would be like stealing a tourist's map and telling them nothing more about Buckingham Palace than the fact that it's somewhere in London. How many days (or weeks) would they spend walking the streets in the vain hope of stumbling across it?

They could take a taxi, of course. But if we're going to take our example to its logical conclusion then that would be like using a search engine and they, too, believe it or not, could also be at risk if the marketeers get their way and deep linking is outlawed.

Imagine an internet without Google, Yahoo or AltaVista and you see the extent of the problem.

Bad for e-commerce
Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote (somewhere on www.useit.com, but I daren't give you the precise URL) that usability can double an e-commerce site's sales. Furthermore, poor usability, where a user has problems getting from the front page to the product they want, results in 27 per cent of potential sales failing.

Half the sites online are little more than a collection of links, and the growth of aggregation services such as Amphetadesk, which lets you read all your news sources in one place rather than spending half a day clicking through various sites, could be dealt a serious blow.

When you consider that these services actively push you towards the individual content providers, you have to question why the Danish courts ruled in favour of the Danish Newspaper Publishers Association when it complained that Newsbooster was linking directly to its stories rather than to its papers' front pages?

The full story is on www.wired.com, but again I won't give you the exact page.

You could argue that it had a case. After all, if the papers charge premium rates for ads on their homepages and visitors enter by other means, then the revenue will drop off.

Sadly though, this seems to be another case where the lawmakers mistakenly believe that new and old technology are further removed from one another than they actually are.

These sites are the electronic presence of established newspapers, yes? So, what would happen if I took the sports pages from the paper-based equivalents and showed them to a friend? Would I be guilty of committing the analogue equivalent of deep linking?

If the Danish lawmakers can't see that giving someone the back pages of your paper and putting a link on your site is one and the same, then they are clearly in no position to make such far-ranging rulings as this.

Grey area
I've discussed the hazy grey of internet law before in this column, and each and every time my concern has been the same: that laws passed in one country may have some bearing on another.

After all, it's not so long ago that the French courts slapped Yahoo's wrists for allowing Nazi memorabilia to be sold on its site, regardless of the fact it could be seen in countries where this is not illegal. Faced with little alternative, Yahoo complied.

Thankfully the Australian legal system, at least, seems to have more sense, inviting an international panel of experts to give evidence in a dispute over where a site is published: in the country where it is written or the country where it is read.

I would plead that powers around the world follow the Australian example, or at least ensure that their lawmakers have used the internet at some point in their lives. Perhaps then they will not make foolish judgements that could damage the very fabric of the net itself.

I dare say Amazon would be able to survive without its affiliates schemes, in which regular personal homepages link to its products and earn commission from the sales they generate, but a lot of smaller sites would not.

It would be a shame if a few ill-considered judgements were to create a virtual online monopoly by denting the ability of emerging e-commerce sites to compete on the same footing as those already established.

As we have seen in the Microsoft versus the US Department of Justice case, a digital monopoly is far more of a problem than a link pointing to a page that perhaps nobody will ever see.

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