After having worked in several investment banks, I view online advertising and e-commerce as basically market data and brokerage, respectively. Just like any financial bourse - like NASDAQ or the NYSE, there needs to be some regulation applied to the internet. Before anyone jumps down my throat - i am absolutely not calling for executive branch US government regulation for the internet.

That would be almost as bad and probably as useless as having the regulation come from the courts. What i would like to see is some form of independent panel to help broker a solution between the big guys like google and yahoo and the firms that have been wrongly blacklisted or delisted from the SERPS.
What happens to a company that gets hacked?

Expensive to do - but what other recourse is there? It seems like the only recourse any of these smaller firms have is to sue. The way it stands now spam and click-fraud regulation is being provided within the framework of the US judicial system by ill-informed courts.

Two recent lawsuits in particular caught my attention: the Spamhaus anti-spam case and the google click-fraud case. The Spamhaus case is particularly disturbing - you have a company that claims to have wrongly been placed on the Spamhaus spam blacklist and they ended up getting a judgement in their favor against basically a non-profit organization which provides an extremely useful service used by millions of people and companies.

Over the next few years until these spam and click-fraud problems are effectively dealt with - my guess is it would be much more efficient and less costly to somehow fund an EFF type arbitration commision to take a look at click-fraud and spam blacklists.