Do you not trust Tim Berners-Lee? How many people would have read your quote or heard you say it in person without Tim deciding to forego maximizing his income?

I hesitate to say this, because you may be joking, but I was, of course, having a little fun with VCs at their own expense.

I could tell the first one was humor so I should have realized the second one was too. Reading too many blogs too quick. Sorry on that :)

I think I am a bit more jaded than most because as an internet marketer I...
- hear advice like "just steal their ad copy"
- see people who once claimed moral superiority start recommending everything with an affiliate program
- see Google's gmail deliver my wife ads for finding lonely cheating housewives because she just emailed a friend saying she was happily married (all the while they talk about how bad it is to buy or sell links that influence PageRank)
- see people resell my information product for 10% the original price without permission
- one of my affiliates went so far as running an ad claiming that I am a scam to draw clicks on his ad so he can get a cut on people searching for my name or my brand and draw them to his entirely fake review of my product
- entire mid-level ad networks destroyed by cookie dropping scams
- people who make millions of dollars off of ringtone reverse billing fraud call the practice a scam after their margins drop off

Many of the income maximizing techniques for online marketers are super dirty.