Ben Edelman continues his excellent work on making the adware/spyware realm transparent. This time he unveils the role of intermediaries, those organizations that mediate between advertisers and the adware/spyware companies (Intermediaries' Role in the Spyware Mess).

Advertiser and intermediary liability is an interesting question of law, well beyond my aspirations for this brief piece. But where ad intermediaries purport to certify or stand behind the quality of the venues where their ads are shown, I'm not receptive to their claims that they can't do what they've promised. Where ad intermediaries merely count advertisement clicks without even claiming to assure traffic quality, the case for blaming intermediaries for improper use of their tracking links may be somewhat weaker (though still cognizable).