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That’s the word that most often comes to mind in my encounters with the commercial web industry. Also known as companies pulling the wool over the eyes of their customers.

A recent one I came across: a web host deliberately crippling core functionality of a platform for the sole purpose of differentiating its own products.

If you want automatic updates, they say, you’ll need to move up a tier. Why? Because that’s more complex? No, quite the reverse. The complexity is found in them turning that functionality off for standard users.

Of course, most of their customers wouldn’t know any better. Their disadvantage is their own ignorance. But I find these tactics lamentable. If anything, it makes their least technical customers more vulnerable to security breaches.

But, hey, that’s business. You have to turn a profit somehow. So let it be at the expense of customer ignorance.