|
When NATS was sold to the industry, it was pitched as tool to keep the program owners honest by stopping shaving. TMM worked very hard to spin this on the boards and pretty soon affiliates started demanding NATS-based programs. The idea was that John's software, which could not be touched by the programs - would be unshaveable. Thats all good and well and had it actually functioned that way, it would have been a good thing for the industry. But these kind of things never work out this way.
Anyone who has taken college level (for that matter, probably high school level as well) courses in government, public service, democracy, world history and the like knows that concentration of power is a dangerous thing. We saw this in Nazi Germany, here in our own country and just about everywhere else throughout the world. The thing is that TMM was saying to affiliates: "Hey, trust US. We have YOUR best interests at heart. We wont let you bring in an independent third party to audit our code to prove this, but we do. You don't wanna get shaved, do you? What? You still don't believe us? You good for nothing board whore, if you publish that, We're, gonna sue you for libel!" and this has worked for a long time for TMM. They have made a good run of scaring their critics into silence and programs into using them. And this concentration of power led to the ultimate in lax, completely incompetent security: a list of passwords sitting on somebody's server.
Given the choice between NATS incompetently managing my personal data and the possibility that a dishonest sponsor *may* shave sales, at the end of the day I'll take the possibility of shaved sales. Its a small price to pay. First off, most program owners are honest, most of them are very generous with their affiliates and most of them would not consider - so its not even a really large risk. Second, dishonest people always get caught at their games eventually. iBill's greed eventually caught up to them. John's incompetence and/or crookedness has caught up to him. If you believe the story that PornGraph was actually sold before the trojans went on, then you can see it caught up with the new owners as PG is no more. Finally, program owners who fuck their affiliates through shaving probably fuck their employees, contractors, business partners and talent as well. By proxy, this means they likely already have a bad reputation and everyone knows who to stay away from anyway.
|