Since its inception, the Internet has functioned to serve the public in a multitude of amazing facets.

Information, connecting with other people, and making shopping more convenient are just a few of the purposes for which the World Wide Web exists.

Among these, however, you will not find annoyance, so why are we forced to put up with a constant barrage of pop-up ads from companies we have no use for?

Anyone who can successfully navigate the Internet without dealing with the frustration of multiple ad interruptions should receive a medal. The whole concept is intrusive in nature, interrupting the natural progression of Internet surfing. Imagine having a conversation with someone who periodically shouts out completely unrelated phrases at you.

It would disrupt your train of thought and generally annoy you to the point of wanting to unplug them.

Companies that force their ads on unwary Internet visitors are offensive. They’re assuming that people actually want to look at their products’ advertisements instead of going to their intended destination, unfettered by distractions. They’re completely wrong, yet continue to do this because of its dynamic marketing strategy: show someone a product enough and they’ll buy it out of confusion, mislead diluted interest, or frustrated resignation.

Internet pop-up ads are a detriment to our society and its future, given that there’s no control over what pops up when. Advertising moguls are slowly corrupting our children.

Say, for instance, that a young lad is doing research on the echidna when he gets offered an exclusive membership to a depraved site to chat with corpulent, one-eyed Slavic grandmothers with elephantiasis. Is this the next generation that we want to be raising?

Since the Internet is such a vast network of useless sites melded together with valuable information, trying to take away the right to use pop-up advertising is like trying to take away the right to reek from the French; there’s bound to be some objections. Free speech will always take a precedent to personal views, and you can’t take one away whilst keeping the other.

There’s not much to be done about this problem, short of mass-emailing these companies that partake in this devious method of subtle propaganda and firmly telling them to stop (or going to each CEO’s house and lighting flaming bags of poo on their doorstep). The bleak alternative is to simply grin and minimize it.