I've recently seen too many examples of media executives failing to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Internet technology. This is a major problem for big media companies, and an opportunity that Internet players like Google are sure to capitalise on.

Peter Bazalgette, Chief Creative Officer of Endemol, had an interesting piece in the Observer last week. It suggests that teenagers revealing personal stuff on the web is a problem, because it denies them the right to a private past. The article is a preview of a forthcoming pamphlet from Demos, the think tank.

At the end of the article Bazelgette talks about the solution to this problem:

"The key elements would be to increase media literacy, enable the withdrawal of consent and ensure that obsolete data can be effectively deleted."

I agree that this is a problem, but the second half of his solution - to delete data from the web - is almost impossible to achieve. Bazelgette quotes a report from the Royal Academy of Engineering, suggesting that:

"Postings to websites might be automatically destroyed after a certain period of time, unless the end user confirmed they wished to have the material retained."

This is not the first time that senior members of the dear old Royal Academy of Engineering have failed to understand computer technology. Less that ten years ago they were even questioning whether computer technology fell within their remit.

You can love it, you can hate it. You can even write a think-tank pamphlet about it. The fact is that once you put something on the Internet it is available for ever. That simple.

Don't believe me? Let's take a look at the history of Endemol on the web. The Internet Archive Project takes regular snapshots of major websites. Here's what they have on Endemol . The archive allows us to look at an early Endemol web site. It's a far cry from the sophisticated stuff they put together to support TV shows today.

I was interested to read that Mr. Ende's live entertainment business was as important as Mr. Mol's TV business back then. Of course Endemol, as the publisher of the website, deleted this information a decade ago, but we can still search for it and read it if we choose to. In thirty years time there is no doubt that in the same way we'll be able to look at the teenage MySpace pages of our political leaders, regardless of whether they have been taken down from MySpace.

There's a wider point here: every technology does some things very easily, and others only with great difficulty. The Internet is great at spreading information widely and at low marginal cost. It is bad at restricting the flow of that information.

Media executives who want to work with the Internet need to understand its strengths and weaknesses very well. Ideas for products, strategies and public policy need to be evolved iteratively, considering technological factors alongside creative, social, and economic aims. Too often the technology conversation is effectively a one-way street. The technology appears, and after a few briefings the executives tell the geeks what to do with it (either explicitly or implicitly, through cultural pressure in the organisation), regardless of whether that plan is simple or practically impossible to make a reality.

The other big example of this syndrome is Digital Rights Management (DRM). Whatever you think of DRM, it is certainly very difficult to implement. Were all the alternatives considered? Or were the technologists told to do their best, because DRM simply had to work?

A lack of optimisation between technology and other specialisations leads to bad plans, lost time, and wasted resources. How long will it take the average media organisation to learn these skills? And will tech-savvy organisations like Google seize the initiative before big media understands?