Commercial sites try to plant links across the Web so they can harvest valuable traffic.
Most companies would kill to have a monster Web player like Microsoft provide hundreds of links to their site. It is, in effect, committing electronic piracy. In this narrow corridor of cyberspace, Ticketmaster must maintain control of the manner in which others utilize and profit from its proprietary services, or face the prospect of a feeding frenzy diluting its content. Microsoft is the computer industry's towering superpower, with its own monopolistic hold on the personal-computer desktop. Lending the dispute a final touch of baroque absurdity, billionaire Paul Allen, who helped found Microsoft and still owns a big stake in it, also owns a big chunk of Ticketmaster.