But in a scary finding for e-commerce boosters, a fast-growing number of occasional online users are "rejecters," abandoning the Internet in droves. Earlier this year, 29 million U.S. adults stopped using the Net. That's nearly double the number of those who had dropped out by 1998.

In our EC-funded research into perceptions we have identified three different types of consumer.

The first, a small group, reject gene technology, and thereby genetically modified food, out of hand. Their main reasons are a moral and ethical aversion to the technology - an instinctive hostility because it is not perceived as natural. For some of these "rejecters" geneticists are "playing God".