Many have postulated that happiness is directly correlated with the control one feels that they have over their environment: Happiness can disappear rapidly when simple things around us fail to function as we desire. Perhaps the remote control is flakey, or everytime that we switch on the car stereo it's reset all of our favourite stations. My wife once became quite angry because I'd reconfigured the items in the trunk of her car. These are minor things, but they gradually diminish the feeling of control that we have over our surroundings. A great example is when computer systems feel that they know better and prevent you from doing simple things that there's no reason that you shouldn't do: Perhaps you're trying to change CDs in your CD player before the system has completely booted, but for some reason it has decided that you shouldn't be able to do that. You scream out, perhaps just in your mind, EJECT THE CD! I PRESSED THE BUTTON: EJECT THE BLOODY CD! With the advent of the ATX standard for computer cases came "virtual power buttons" that are more of a polite request that the system shut down: I recall an early ATX motherboard I had that did not have a power switch override, and trying to turn off the power when the system was locked hard was fruitless: I had to squeeze behind the system and pull the power plug right out to shut it down. On my Windows system everytime I accidentally expand the documents tab, and there happens to be a document that I loaded from another network machine that happens to be off right now, my system freezes for some 45 seconds, removing any control I may have. These little tiny quirks that mess with our control over our environment can be incredibly frustrating, and eventually they will put even the most Zen -like among us into a bad mood that carries to other parts of our life.
What does this have to do with the Internet, or the Tragedy of the Commons? How many times have you fought with pop-ups that continue to emerge from sources unknown, when all you're trying to do is find a recipe for hamburgers, or to look for reviews for a car that you've been contemplating? Unless you take a proactive approach to web browsing, and you defensively browse the web with a browser like Opera which lets you disable pop-up windows, you likely get these by the dozen. Every time you find a cluster of these pop-ups polluting your desktop, you are struck with a feeling of lack of control over your own computer system: This is your computer, using your connection, yet mischevious sites are circumventing your control and your own computer (if you're using a browser that doesn't let you override these settings) is conspiring with the pop-up companies and allows them to do things that you've clearly demonstrated that you don't like. One large Canadian company's corporate site has a pop-up that informs you of a service that they offer, and like many people I instinctively close it (which should be a clue that I'm not interested), yet every single time you change pages this pop-up reappears. I sent them a letter informing them of a method they could utilize, using a simple client-side cookie, to only pop this up once per session but they weren't interested. I suppose they believe that eventually you'll just give up and order the service.
The more that websites subvert people's control, the more that people will relate surfing the internet with a nuisance hassle, either overtly or subconsciously, the less the casual surfer will browse the internet. Because of such abusive sites many simply refuse to follow links from Google that don't go to well known domains that they trust: The Internet has become a wild west where people only go where they feel safe, exactly contrary to the "empower the little guy" origins of the net. This is where the tragedy of the commons comes into play: Many large sites think "Well, sure it hurts the growth and well being of the net when I spawn countless pop-ups, but I'm just one little site so what difference is it going to make? Everyone else is doing it anyways..." Of course everyone else is thinking exactly the same thing, leading to a hostile web that people subconsciously avoid.
I don't expect all websites to stop the abusive behaviour (there are always dirtbags out there), but really the browser vendors shouldn't have allowed this to occur in the first place. Thankfully rumor has it that Internet Explorer 7 will include functionality to ban popup and other nefarious advertising without having to resort to third party utilities, or cripple your usability by wholesale disabling of scripting. If you're into the competing browsers, of course both Mozilla and Opera have varying level of pop-up banishment.
If the "web" is to continue to grow for the common man and woman to use as an information utility, web browser authors and web content creators need to perform a serious evaluation of usability. If they don't people will stop using the web as unless absolutely necessary. While it might appear to be "one little window", when it's one (or more) little window(s) on the hundreds of pages that a user will visit in a session, it becomes a considerable nuisiance, and of course the co-opting of people's PC means that the net effect is far greater than the sum of simply closing all of those windows.