Congress Scrutinizes NebuAd

Congress is at it again, and once again the victim is NebuAd. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce is sending threatening letters to the behavioral advertising company, demanding information about their practices.

We reported earlier about how overblown the concerns over NebuAd really are. Advertising targeting is crucial to the future of the free internet. Better-targeted, and therfore more valuable, ads support websites that need to pay their bills somehow. And better-targeted ads are better for consumers, enabling them to learn about products they want and not about products they don’t. (Do I really need tampons?)

For more on the benefits of online advertising – and the privacy concerns it generates – see Ryan Radia and Wayne Crews’s recent C:\Spin.