Back in the early days, the late 1990's and early 2000's it was the wild, wild west. There were no videos, no social media, no Hotmail and some real lousy search engines, everyone was a pioneer. You tried everything you could think of to be successful online and there was no guilty feelings.
Heck, I had 4 computers in my basement doing email marketing with a desktop autoresponder called network responder. I was the first or one of the first to create a capture page generator. Capture page is what it was called before the term squeeze page was coined in 2004.
At that time you did what ever was necessary to keep your business afloat. There were no real rules and just about the only thing you had to worry about was not getting your hosting company mad at you so they would not shut you down. That almost happened to me one time for overloading the server.
So I got a dedicated server and made adjustments to network responder on the computers in the basement and was back in business.
Then came Hotmail, Google took the lead, the FTC fined a famous marketer 25,000 and took his computer, CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which everyone was scared to death of, but turned out to be a law with little to no teeth, and popup blockers and much, much more. That just gave us more things to create that were a work around everything that started getting in our way.
It actually made us more money. There may be laws, large organizations, technology and competition that get in your way, your goal is to find a way around them or beat them at their own game.
The Internet is changing every day. It is like trying to build a foundation for a building in quick sand. You have to do what ever is necessary to keep your head above the sand. Your goal is to be successful without getting into any kind of trouble. In fact, you will find that you will be more successful by playing by the rules.
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