ABSTRACT
In the traditional market, the advertising of products and services entail on the one side, the dissemination of information through different traditional media – TV advertising, magazine advertising or other advertising media and on the other side, the sale stage involves office infrastructure and personnel. In comparison with traditional advertising, Internet advertising reduces the different transaction stages consisting in search of information, contact with the company and the selling process by immediate contact with consumers. The efficiency of this medium is reflected by a recent study of the New Media Group of PricewaterhouseCoopers showing that Internet advertising surpassed a couple of traditional media sectors and follows magazines, by a considerable margin.1 Furthermore, a forecast by Jupiter Research predicts that online advertising will more than double over the next five years and it will grow from $6.6 billion in 2003 to $16.1 billion in 2009.2 Several reasons are given for the effectiveness of the online market: the consumers exercise their choice of products and services almost instantly, spend less time making their buying decisions and expect efficient customer service.3 This can be translated in pressure on Internet advertising pricing by sliding down the cost of the traditional mass market advertising.4 In this case, the respect of similar rules by all the participants in the electronic market represents a need for allowing the electronic market to develop into a fair market. If some businesses would make use of misleading or aggressive commercial practices in order to gain profits or retain market share, the impact of misleading advertising would have important adverse economic consequences on both consumers and businesses. When the advertising channel is used by the companies to provide useful, complete and accurate information, advertising allows consumers to take advantage of the low prices and high quality products and services. Contrary, when businesses would display (1) misleading advertising on the websites; and (2) send unsolicited e-mail advertising (that can be deceptive or that do not include opt-out provision for future messages or which come from false ‘from’ addresses), there is a clear infringement of the fair competitive market.
