Bama

While I applaud your ideals, this will most likely will never happen. Any such association would have to be globally aligned and have powers of consequence - something not even 10 years from now will certainly not see. I don't think many people look at the U.N. as being a success story of world policy and the whole trade embargo to punish the bad doers into submission is an overly successful or timely approach to solving differences in operations.

This industry is dollar driven and no association or committee is going to change that because agreement between the masses will never be achieved. Only that which directly and immediately effects the pocket-book will drive change.

Step back for a moment and ponder these 2 questions separately:

• If I owned a webmaster program and I had an affiliate sending me a LOT of joins that I believe were generated from the use of distributed spyware and to date no one knew about this so I wasn't suffering negative press - would I cancel their account?
• All of the other webmasters want to boycot Sponsor A until they spyware proof their webmaster program but they're my highest earning sponsor. I feed my family and buy my toys from the money earned from this sponsor and changing over to Sponsor B would be a pain in the ass and probably not earn me as much - would you pull your links?

The waters muddy pretty quickly don't they? Sure, the bottom performers won't have any problem switching but it isn't the bottom performers who will dictate the actual change.

So the immediate problem only has 2 solutions:

Gather a list of high profile high producing webmasters that can lead the charge who can also pledge to answer yes to question 2 above and then approach a sponsor with an "Either you _______ or we (and this group of affiliates _______".

Sponsors just go ahead and do ____________ and side step the issue altogether.