Company policy and enforcement
Any company has the right to dictate, within resaon, what an employee can and cannot do when they are on the clock (being paid). Any employee can disagree with this policy by not working there, or like Mike, working for themselves.
If the company policy was that you can spend time on Facebook/Bebo/Myspace but the time spent must be made up at home, at your cost, using your machine, your bandwidth and your communications facilities, how many employees would cry foul.
Part of the mechanics of any business is a return on investment.
Is people chatting to friends instead of customers a return on the investment of training those people?
Is people browsing social networking sites a return on the costs paid for internet bandwidth and the hardware being used to do it?
Anyone coming from a reasonable point of view will admit that although some leeway is given for the odd browsing activity or such like can be overlooked, but by the same token, people spending hours not doing what they get paid for is just plain wrong.
A question to Mike though; if you are, within your own business, employing staff, and those staff spend more time chatting on their phones, and browsing the internet at your expense, rather than making you money, would you sack them? If they spend 10% of the time in which you pay them doing that instead of making you money, would you be happy about it?
Lets face it, people work to make money, anything that is a cost to them is a bad thing unless it is providing a superior return on investment and I cannot see anyone arguing with that. If you do argue the opposite, can you send me the money you don't want or need, that you can happily waste on these people.