This rant is a continuation of our discussion concerning distracted writing.

I mean it. Has the Internet become useless? Seriously, we have to filter out hundreds if not thousands of spam emails each and every day. Many of us will never know about the countless volume of spam the various email hosts we use filter out before it gets into their servers. If this was the only problem it would be survivable, but it is not.

Viewing the Internet as an advertising medium businesses and scammers have turned the thing into a mountain of click bait, pop up and pop under ads, not to mention annoying exploding videos which shove the content you are trying to read out of the way forcing you to interact with them to reach the content. Just how many sites can you even trust given the overwhelming quantity of fake news.

Yes, fake news has been in the news quite a bit, but it comes in various forms. The only form media companies are talking about right now are the outlandish fake news stories associated with the 2016 election and its players. How about the fake news which exists on the media sites themselves with full blessing of the site owners?

I’ve ranted before about yahoo and it massive amount of “sponsored” articles, but you see them everywhere now. I listen to stories on NPR and they contain interviews of people saying things like “I don’t trust anything provided by the standard media outlets anymore, haven’t for awhile.” It is even worse on the supposedly “trusted” Web portals designed to consolidate and filter news for us.

Now we are seeing Facebook and Google finally being taken to the wood shed. Yes, the free wheeling kids are about to learn that childhood is over. They have responsibilities and there are consequences.

Printed magazines have long since fallen into the fake news trap. As advertising revenue fell we started seeing more and more “sponsored” articles which typically had the “sponsored” disclaimer in tiny print near the edge of the page. This trend has increased now that magazines all have Web sites with voracious no-cost content needs.

I recently read something in Time about The Dark Web being advertisement free or that it was supposed to be. Well, so was the Internet. It was supposed to be an Information Super Highway, not an eight foot wide sewer pipe of spam. Since The Global Village did not start with a Global Village Counsel but was left to the whims of people with the ethics and morals of Wall Street bankers, we now have a pathetic virus infested mess.

Now it appears some of those same creatures are paying visit to their kin on The Dark Web because a Dark Web Google clone has sprouted up there and plans to sell advertising.

https://www.wired.com/2014/04/grams-search-engine-dark-web/

So, if you were thinking about leaving the crime-are-us Wall Street type Internet for the more honest about it crime-are-us Dark Web to escape the spam and ads, fugetaboutit Mt. Brasco.