I agree that the biggest issue here is the one of delivery.
Be it a product or service, if you don't deliver it, you're a con artist for promoting it to some poor schmuck.
But hold the phone for a moment!
There are some poor schmucks out there who, particularly in the service side of things, are so pathetically inept that these shonky services actually aren't as shonky as they seem to people with a modicum of intelligence, such as ourselves.
Example time, apologies in advance for name dropping my own biz, I really don't mean it as a sales pitch:
When I started with Affiliation Cash, I was using an LP that hocked a substitute to MS Office. I saw the filesharing programs that we offer and thought they were a scam. I mean, P2P is totally free if you're not a complete gibbering idiot.
Anyway, I'm a social kinda guy, so I started talking to my AM a fair bit (it's how I became an AM in the end. Someone left, they liked me, I got the offer) and some of the emails he forwarded me from the complaints department *facepalm* Some of these people's could not figure their arse from their elbows if 1st year med students had laser pointers and batons on them...
People that wanted to know why a .TORRENT file wouldn't play in media players, or how come discs wouldn't play in the DVD drive when they dragged and dropped .MKVs on them, etc etc.
A particular favourite of mine is some guy that wrote in asking why it didn't play on his entire wall like in the picture (since removed) on the site. When we attempted to offer support for his projector, it turned out he didn't have one but "that shouldn't matter, should it?" *wishing we had a retarded emoticon right now*
To these people, $50 is a
bargain for tech support, and they get an unlimited amount of it (sadly).
The point I'm trying to convey is that some offers ARE outright scams. Pretty much anything by unsolicited email is guaranteed to be.
Others that appear scammy are simply a matter of filling a gap for the untold legions of morons.
Both of these could easily be killed off if people just went and did a little bit of research, instead of expecting someone ti give them all the answers, or have someone else to shoulder the blame or save their arses.
The sheeple already think of that stuff as what affiliate marketing is, and as more and more sheeple - consumers - get conned, misled or bullshitted to, the politicians will want to get involved - fun! more laws!
They already are.... Snowe Bill, anyone?
The description of it is almost nothing like what it's actually proposing to do.