Inventor Of The Pop-Up Ad Apologizes

The man who invented the pop-up ad, has seen the error of his ways, and apologized in an essay for the Atlantic.

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, writes, "I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I'm sorry. Our intentions were good."

Zuckerman invented it while he was at the startup Tripod.com during the days of the dotcom bubble in the 1990s. He says  now, "I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services." He calls the ad-supported model of the Internet, "bad, broken and corrosive."