What happens when you lose economic trust? Most people (and companies) panic. It may not be overt, it may not even be recognized, but it's there. New behavior patterns take over. Instead of being abundance conscious (a term meaning that you trust in the universal availability of resources), people become scarcity conscious (meaning that you instead are worried about the availability of resources). And when people become scarcity conscious, they begin to do unfortunate things.

They begin to hoard. They tend to share less and play less nicely with others. And, out of fear, they tend to practice petty greed.

Click trapping
I promised you three examples of petty greed. The first is called variously "click trapping" or "mouse trapping." The idea is very simple. You're reading a Web page and click on a link, which takes you to someone's site. When you're done reading that site, you decide to go back to the original page you were on. You click the back button and nothing happens! You've just been click trapped.

Deluded site operators feel that if they prevent you from returning to the page from whence you came, you'll spend more time on their site. More time on their site increases stickiness, and we all know how important and valuable it is to keep people on your site, even if you have to piss them off to do so (he says sarcastically).

This practice has become visible enough to inspire mainstream media to write about it. In fact, Leslie Miller in her USA Today article,"Mouse-trapping locks Web users in a virtual maze," at http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-05-29-mousetrapping.htm says this practice is, "One of the sneaky ways that sites are increasingly trying to control visitors' online behavior." She also describes it as "Rude, if not downright threatening."

Click trapping is an example of petty greed, nothing more. And it's a stupid example at that. The site operator is so concerned about keeping those eyeballs that he's willing to sacrifice the inherent goodwill of the Internet and to try to break down the very nature of the interlinked World Wide Web. All so he can get a few extra seconds of stickiness.

The inherent goodwill of the Web is manifested in hyperlinks. The links are what changes everything. The use of the word "web" in the name reinforces this concept of reciprocal, universal, and unrestricted linking. By click trapping, a site operator is attacking the essence of the Web and, at the same time, breaking down trust.

And, as I mentioned, click trappers are also being stupid. They're not even helping themselves. I've visited sites that click trap and link to other sites within their own network. When I've tried going back to a parent site, I can't because I was click trapped. As a result, users are often prevented from successfully navigating around the click trapper's own site. Dumb.

And, of course, it gets worse. As a Web site operator myself, I'm probably going to avoid linking to click trapping sites. After all, if I know my readers can't get back to my site after clicking on a link to a trapper's site, I'm going to be less inclined to link to it.