The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings painfully true. The mechanical difference between getting someone to buy sneakers versus vote for a candidate is surprisingly small.
What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. We debate content moderation policies and algorithmic transparency, but rarely question the underlying attention marketplace that makes manipulation profitable in the first place.
The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic. We've built something that converts human attention into money with increasingly terrifying efficiency, but we're all trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where nobody can unilaterally disarm.
Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.
Is this proposal radical? Absolutely. But sometimes the Overton window needs a sledgehammer.
P.S. If you are curious about the relationship between Sigmund Freud, propaganda, and the origins of the ad industry, check out the documentary “Century of the Self”.
I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.
And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
"We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is and we understand scaling it is immensely valuable and fundamentally changes everything.
"We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway, don't tread on me, yadda yadda.
It's so transparent to me now, and I've passed this curse onto you.
Nothing else in law works this way. No definition is ironclad. This is what legislators, agencies, and courts are for. We all know this.
Ironically this is something lawyers and judges would pick up on immediately. You need an underlying principle of harm that can be applied consistently.
There are many things individuals will consider "important and valuable to them" that are harmful to others. We prevent individuals from harming others for their own self-gain because that's what societies do.
Consider that the author considers propaganda to be a form of advertising, and suggests we ban propaganda. Well, Fox News is is probably one of the most influential sources of propaganda in our era, and they're just publishing news with a strong political slant. This anti-propaganda law effectively would have to make it illegal to publish political opinion pieces. That would be absurdly draconian.
For the record, I'm strongly anti-advertising, but a complete ban on advertisement would be impossible to construct because you can't draw a sharp line between ads and free expression.
Actually (and hilariously) Fox News according to their own court filings do not publish news, they are an entertainment product.
And I say ironically because that's exactly the mechanism people are clamoring for in this discussion: it's the courts. Lawyers argue and courts eventually decide definitions all the time, because it's highly impractical to belabor and endlessly debate passing new laws because we don't have ironclad definitions in them beforehand.
If you want my humble opinion, in a legal/ban sense, I would define advertising as:
> Communicative material that is placed strategically by publishers or media for a price/by way of other agreement to drive awareness of products or services with the intent to generate attention and sales of said products or services.
The economical fallout would be extensive. Google's and Meta's business model (and that of many others) would basically disappear overnight. While I'm not a fan of either, and think there should be much stricter regulation for (very large) tech-companies, this would make financing of a lot of important products infeasible. But not just in tech. Think about product placement in movies or television, banners in big sporting events etc. Who'd pay for that? The state? With whose money?
Also, it would make entering markets much harder, if you're not a household name already. If I read your definition correctly, you couldn't even give a complimentary account for your SaaS product to a reviewer ("by way of other agreement") to enable them to test your software (and hopefully write favorably about it if they're convinced). This would definitely hurt consumers.
I think you should be allowed to try to change minds. If anything, we should outlaw the massive tracking effort involved in advertising.
[1]: What about a political party publishing a newspaper and paying their staff? Is that okay? I could construct more examples, and life is even messier. On the other hand, I have to admit, that the focus on the payment aspect makes this much more palatable to me.
There was likely economic fallout many would call extensive when we mandated equal wages for minorities and an end to child labor, and yet businesses soldier on. Turns out, if you’re selling products people need, momentary disruptions and changing market conditions generally don’t mean you suddenly cannot conduct business.
> Think about product placement in movies or television, banners in big sporting events etc. Who'd pay for that? The state? With whose money?
One of sport fans biggest complaints is the overwhelming number of ads and the overbearing, bloated organizations behind pro tier sports. It seems like bankrupting a lot of them and letting teams return to public goods funded by municipalities would be a huge step forward into preserving sports as a social event, not a profit seeking venture.
And it’s not like pro sports aren’t already benefitting from taxpayers left and right. We could just get rid of the money men up top and let things settle where they may. Sure we may not get blockbuster sports events anymore, but maybe more people could then afford to actually attend?
> This would definitely hurt consumers.
Consumers LOATHE SaaS. They would cheer for it to be killed off.
> What about a political party publishing a newspaper and paying their staff?
I don’t see how that would run afoul of my definition?
Advertising isn't child labor. If there was something immoral about telling people about your product, you'd have a point.
> It seems like bankrupting a lot of them and letting teams return to public goods funded by municipalities would be a huge step forward into preserving sports as a social event, not a profit seeking venture.
I disagree. I don't think the state has any place here. And profit seeking will not stop just because the source of the money changes and there's less of it.
> We could just get rid of the money men up top and let things settle where they may. Sure we may not get blockbuster sports events anymore, but maybe more people could then afford to actually attend?
If there's less money in it, there will be less supply, so I don't see how it would be easier for people to afford attendance.
Your local little league team couldn't even get a sponsorship for their uniforms anymore.
> Consumers LOATHE SaaS. They would cheer for it to be killed off.
SaaS was just an example for a new product trying to gain market share.
Also, right now they are free to not use SaaS products if they do hate the concept. Afterwards they're practically forced to not use it, because it's much harder to get one off the ground.
> I don’t see how that would run afoul of my definition?
Well, they're paying people to write positively about them and their product/politics. I can see it.
It wasn't a moral argument, though I can see how you read it that way. I'm just saying, we change the market via regulation (or at least, used to) all the time, and businesses survive despite their endless moaning about it.
They complained about us not letting them keep cancer-causing chemicals in the break room too, mandatory break times for given lengths of work shifts, etc. etc. etc. They always whine about they'll go broke if they have to X or Y, no matter how reasonable it is.
> And profit seeking will not stop just because the source of the money changes and there's less of it.
State funded operations don't generally prioritize profits unless directed to by weird politicians who think public goods should make money, like the current head of the USPS. Generally, tax funded orgs are just us going "we would like this service, and everyone in the city/county/state/country chipping in like $30 a year means we don't need to worry about it.
> Your local little league team couldn't even get a sponsorship for their uniforms anymore.
Yeah, again. Fund it with taxes. Little league players shouldn't be billboards. If we want this stuff, we should have the political will to allocate money to pay for it. I don't see why if we decide we want little league baseball that said baseball team should then need to make the rounds in the community with a hat out. That's silly.
> Also, right now they are free to not use SaaS products if they do hate the concept.
No they aren't. If you want Microsoft Office, any Adobe product, Quickbooks, just to name a few, your only options are subscriptions to them.
> Well, they're paying people to write positively about them and their product/politics.
I mean just having a newsletter that advocates for socialism doesn't mean you're advertising socialism. It's propaganda, and that's fine. Propaganda isn't necessarily a bad thing despite the modern attitudes towards it. The pro-WWII ads that sold bonds were propaganda. The cartoons depicting Hitler as a buffoon were propaganda.
In any case though, I wouldn't consider that advertising. In my mind, advertising would only occur when a given publication is including content referencing a product or service where it would normally not otherwise be.
Ah, got it. Then I'd say we should only regulate things that need regulation. I don't think advertising is one of these. The data collection happening in the background on the other hand...
> State funded operations don't generally prioritize profits [...]
Yes, but people generally do, even when they're funded by government. They just lose the incentive to create a good product.
> Yeah, again. Fund [the local little league] with taxes.
No. Why should I pay for something like that?
> If you want Microsoft Office, any Adobe product, Quickbooks, just to name a few, your only options are subscriptions to them.
Yes. And there's LibreOffice, GIMP/Inkscape and GNUCash (and many others) if you don't like that model.
BTW, these aren't what I was thinking about. I assume big players would generally be favored by such a prohibition, because they're already known to a wide audience.
> I mean just having a newsletter that advocates for socialism doesn't mean you're advertising socialism. It's propaganda, and that's fine. Propaganda isn't necessarily a bad thing despite the modern attitudes towards it.
I agree with you, but the article explicitly lumps together propaganda and advertising. I think that's dangerous. Socialists should be free to make their case, even though I think it's idiotic
So is the fallout from Trump's new tariffs, yet they still got done.
I don't think the government cares about economic fallout unless it affects billionaires, so you're right, advertising will never be banned because it would cut into the profits of the president's richest and most vocal supporters.
Unless the economic policy stands to benefit the working class.
Tax cuts for billionaires will pass all day, with zero issues at all. Anything, and I do mean anything that stands to benefit the general public has to have three plans on how it will either pay for itself or otherwise be paid for, and if any of them involve even a slight tax increase, it will never even see a vote, let alone pass.
That's not advertising by any standard, unless they're being paid by someone to do it (whether they currently are or not is irrelevant). Just because someone can benefit doesn't make it advertising/propaganda, it's about the whether the funding comes from someone who benefits from the particular content.
As another example, Good Mythical Morning and other YouTube shows frequently do product comparisons / tests. That clearly isn't advertising, unless the companies who make those product are sponsoring them.
Did the pay full retail price for the product or get a discount?
Did they get the product at release or in advance?
Did they get access to detailed specs or the people who built it?
Did they give feedback that went into the product?
Did they get a company/lab/event visit and some swag?
Did they get preferential access for the next product?
"Sponsoring" is just the most visible, clearly disclosed way to advertise in those. But fundamentally, getting and preserving access is immensely valuable and there may not be funds moving between the two groups.
None of us are completely unbiased. Getting those things disclosed would be a great improvement.
You are describing the ability of good engineers to deal with vague and ill defined problems.
> "We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway..
Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
> It's so transparent to me now
Hope I cleared up the confusion.
> "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization"
I am not - and did not make the claim. I am explaining why you are seeing engineers care more about vagueness in one context than another.
I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.
> As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
When the thing up for discussion is the hacking of our psyche to impose a will - ads - onto others, at a scale and persistence hereto unimaginable by the worst tyrants in history.
> […]
> I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.
Very well said across the board.
My stance is that any time—literally any time—someone is proposing and/or promoting a policy that can stifle, chill, and/or suppress free speech in any way, even if indirectly, the bar for justifying such a policy must necessarily be extremely high.
In theory, I actually agree with many of the arguments against advertising, but there’s a clear slippery slope with this “let’s ban advertising” line of thinking, so yes, the bare minimum is being able to concretely define what advertising even is in such a context.
The slippery slope is a fallacy and also a thing that fairly consistently happens in politics and law.
The point far up this thread, however, was that this proposal isn't a slippery slope. It's a leaky sieve. If there is a law against speech that covers enough cases to be even slightly effective against people with lawyers, and I am powerful and don't like you, then you are going to prison.
It seems like you're one of those HN people who thinks they'll convince people scrolling by with petty semantic arguments and snark. Maybe that's true! But it doesn't work on me. For example, if you're gonna make a claim like "I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation", I'd want to see evidence that deals with the fact that the courts have come up with their own standards for their own review (rational basis, strict scrutiny) and indeed have formulated their own standards for evaluating legislation entirely on their own (undue burden, imminent lawless action, etc). From your comments in this thread, I'd guess you don't know anything about laws, legislation, judicial review, and the like. But hey, don't let that stop you from warning about the dangers of "destructive power of imposing your will on others".
In what way could you learn about novel commercial things in the absence of advertising? Word of mouth alone?
And yes, word of mouth and non-paid advertising is absolutely capable of spreading awareness on its own.
Human attention is scarce. Demand for that attention is endless. Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely (vs just regulating with guardrails). Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity. Instead of something that attempts to land on fairness (even if imperfect), no market at all guarantees unfairness.
Advertising puts a price on the scarce commodity of attention in broad strokes, and it not always, but generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising). I know, please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes.
Like all markets, we should regulate advertising to ensure it doesn’t get out of control. But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
Hence why this is a non-serious, silly idea.
Ok? If that's how we define "brutal authoritarianism," I guess I'm a brutal authoritarian. There's a natural market for mob hitmen (scarce + in-demand)—are you opposed to a "brutal authoritarian" crackdown on those too?
> Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity.
Citation very much needed. Suppliers of lead paint, asbestos, ozone-destroying aerosols, contaminated foodstuffs, etc. did not regulate themselves in a decentralized manner. In fact, take virtually any toxic contaminant or hazardous product and you'll usually find that the market colluded to cover up evidence of harm, rather than "self-regulating."
> generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser
Absolutely not. Consumers do not exert demand for certain types of ads in preference to others. There's no mechanism for ads to converge toward high audience value. It's advertiser value that is optimized for, often to the detriment of consumers (e.g. advertisements for profitable scams, which have negative value).
Even if you want to argue that advertisements inform consumers to some extent, that's probably outweighed by the extent that they misinform consumers. Consider infomercial products: Regular kitchen knives don't need an advertisement because demand is inelastic. If you're cooking, you need a knife; nobody has to promote the idea of knives. But the "slap-chop" is a product with elastic demand, and thus the marginal value of advertising is much greater for them. Hence, they can afford to buy up huge amounts of ad space to drum up demand for an essentially worthless product. The advertising ecosystem has perverse incentive to promote scams.
> But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
There are a lot of noxious and socially destructive things which are not practical to ban.
No, murder is not comparable to advertising. And no, not once did I ever say the phrase "self-regulating" nor did I argue against regulation of advertising.
Your fundamental belief (and the prevailing view on HN) that advertising is a scam and intended to "misinform" is incorrect. Apparently I need to say this again because it's hard to grasp the concept of nuance--Are some advertisements scams? Absolutely. The market is not perfectly efficient, but again, markets trend in the direction of efficiency over long periods.
Ultimately, the vast majority of advertisements you see are for the products that are the most desired by people, hence why they can profitably continue advertising over time.
Just because you aren't interested in the product, doesn't mean it's a scam . Enough people in the audience of whatever media you consume think otherwise, hence why the company is advertising there. Again, there are absolutely stupid companies wasting money on stupid ads, but they tend to get outcompeted by the smarter ones. I get it though, giving people you believe are less intelligent than you the freedom to make decisions is frustrating.
Even in your example of the slap-chop, which you say is a "worthless product," funny enough, I literally just used a similar product yesterday to dice a large amount of onions quickly. Guess I'm stupid and I need an authoritarian like you to tell me a smarter way to live.
Alternatively though, the idea that knife makers don't promote their products is just hilarious to me. The market for kitchen knives is extremely competitive and just because the advertising doesn't take the form of a 30 second TV spot from the 1990s doesn't mean they just throw their products on the market with zero promotion. How do you think certain brands even appear on the shelves of the stores you shop in? You're gonna hate this too...turns out shelf space is scarce so shelf space is a market as well, and it's more of an economic calculation than one of technical passion. Oh no not again!
Sure it is. You made a sweeping statement about services in a market; those are both services subject to market forces. You say (supposing for the sake of argument that advertising is as harmful as the article makes it out to be) that a ban would be unacceptably authoritarian and ineffective anyway. Well, we ban harmful things in the market all the time. Such as murder.
> not once did I ever say the phrase "self-regulating"
No, you said the phrase "decentralized market regulation," which means the same thing as "the market regulating itself," and suggests the absence of any actual regulation whatsoever.
> nor did I argue against regulation of advertising
You said natural markets could only be controlled through authoritarian means, which is always worse than "decentralized market regulation." This is an argument in favour of deregulation.
> Ultimately, the vast majority of advertisements you see are for the products that are the most desired by people
No, they're for products with the largest marginal return on showing ads. That's why you often see ads for pharmaceuticals that only a tiny segment of the population will ever need—because they're highly profitable and thus advertising offers high returns.
> that advertising is a scam and intended to "misinform" is incorrect
Intended to *manipulate. Whether they inform or misinform is totally orthogonal to their purpose.
> Are some advertisements scams? Absolutely. The market is not perfectly efficient
The efficient market hypothesis applies specifically to asset markets. There's no real model of what an "efficient price" is for most consumer goods, services, or advertising campaigns, because those are not assets and do not retain market value after sale.
Anyway, this strikes me as a bizarrely dogmatic way to "debunk" the widespread presence of scams in our society. Multi-level marketing schemes have not gone anywhere, nor has the related category of self-help seminar grifts. You can keep a lie going for a very long time, and make a lot of money doing so. "Efficient markets" do not protect us from that reality.
> Guess I'm stupid
…
> and I need an authoritarian like you to tell me a smarter way to live.
Try a mandoline slicer, with the julienne teeth up.
> The market for kitchen knives is extremely competitive [even though] the advertising doesn't take the form of a 30 second TV spot[.] [...] How do you think certain brands even appear on the shelves of the stores you shop in? [...] it's more of an economic calculation
So you're telling me that, when it comes to cooking knives, the incentives at play mean I'm primarily exposed to advertising for scam products? Wow I'm glad we agree.
Not sure those are good examples, because none of them were “regulated” or banned until there was already a decent alternative available. What is the alternative to advertising, for capturing human attention?
Unsponsored product reviews, I suppose. I'm not a proponent of a complete ban on advertising—I just find the argument being made in favour of deregulation to be deeply silly.
> Not sure those are good examples, because none of them were “regulated” or banned until there was already a decent alternative available.
The argument I'm responding to there is, "Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity." There's no mention there of the availability of alternatives—that's not the point being made.
Just because something is highly sought after e.g. kidneys and protection from violence doesn't mean we should commoditize it. See American health care. Some resources are inflexible and allow infinite rent seeking opportunities.
This is true, but only for the set of messages that produce value that can be captured by the advertiser. This set is a small subset of messages that produce value. For example, a message about the benefits of excercise/socializing/climate action would produce a lot of value, but not in a form that any single advertiser can capture. So a lot of high value messages don't get produced in the current system, and might have a better chance in a more "natural" attention economy.
Advertising also increases the value of a product, so the value of things whose value can be captured by advertisers will be inflated when compared to their value in an environment without advertising.
There are alternatives, but most people choose to pay with attention, so that's where creators are being pulled to. But that doesn't mean that you're forced to consume it.
But you know that.
When you're manipulating someone to choose against their best interests, it's happening on an unconscious level and freedom of choice is completely removed from the picture. In these types of cases, no I don't believe there is consent involved.
If I go play chess against someone who spent 150,000 human years studying how to beat me, to say 'well, it was all up to your mental strength, same as it's always been forever, and you just weren't strong enough' is BS.
In the last 40 years (which equate to 80 billion human years of output) there has been hundreds of thousands if not millions of human years of effort put into tearing down peoples' barriers, implanting ideas, etc. This isn't 1960 madmen advertising, this is something different from all of human history. Never before have hundreds of thousands to millions of human years been dedicated to manipulating humans in such a continuous, scientifically approached way and on such ever present/connected platforms with the synchronization of message/manipulation across contexts/mediums.
Edit: Changed from using 'man years' to 'human years'.
And yet it seems that entirely random ads would have a better chance of catching my interest than whatever super smart master mind strategy they are doing after spending thousands of years on that problem.
Went to an undergraduate library to surf, and low and behold: women's underwear, and I am not a cross dresser. If you do not identify yourself you get the default.
It's almost all "AI" driven. Yes the halcinating kind.
I understand where you're coming from, but psychological manipulation is everywhere and committed by everyone all the time and defining its use as voiding consent seems very problematic.
It's easy to say what your best interests would be if you were in their situation, but they might assign very different values to certain outcomes.
There's no clearer lack of consent than attempts by advertisers to circumvent, block, or ban ad-blockers.
These advertisers could choose to put up paywalls but that would harm their search rankings, so they don't. Instead, they play games with cloaking [1] and other SEO techniques in order to bypass the user's wishes and show them ads (or even ads + cloaked paywalls).
At least YouTube offers a paid premium service which remains ad-free.
There is consent (otherwise you wouldn't visit the website in the first place), users with adblock are just trying to minimize their exposure. Totally reasonable (I do it too), but nobody is forcing them.
That may be true for e.g. a malicious software on your computer that force-redirects your regular browsing activity to some evil site, but that's not what we're discussing.
Clicking a link is not consent. I have no idea what I am going to see until I reach the website. My browser has rendered the website and executed their JavaScript long before I've had any chance to even process what I'm seeing, let alone consent to it.
Clicking a link is equivalent to walking into a tattoo parlour. We don't infer that I consent to receiving a tattoo just by walking through the doorway. Stealing my attention with ads is less extreme of an intrusion onto my person than a tattoo, obviously, but it is still an intrusion.
> I believe that would be very difficult, it would likely create some additional interesting cases (are adblockers now fraud?)
I don't know if companies consider it fraud, but for example Telly is giving away a TV as long as you let it eat your data and serve you ads, and if they figure out you're preventing that somehow they want the TV back [0]. So models like this countenance some kind of evasion at least a little.
I've asked other people this same question because most of the time platforms don't make advertising opt-in/out, basically for any amount of money. The best answer I've gotten--which I buy--is that the value in ads/marketing/data isn't 1 person, it's the aggregate. So like, if you have 1M users generating $100k, but then 500k of those users opt-out each for a dollar, ostensibly it seems like this is equivalent but the value of data on 500k users isn't $500k, it's substantially less, so the opt-out isn't a dollar, it's more like $5 or something, which makes this a non-option. So conceiving of this business model as a kind of "advertising lets you have this 'for free'" is only true in the most literal sense, as long as you don't think your individual data or privacy has any value or you ignore the implication that you could opt-out for whatever that value is.
Beyond that, it creates perverse incentives. We don't think that advertising benefits people, we have a whole other category called "Public Service Announcements" that kind of benefits people, and represents a sliver of actual "advertising". Say what you want about ads for diabetes meds or whatever, but they're not PSAs. The value to the consumer isn't the ad but what the ad funds, which makes platforms (tv stations, social media network, whatever) very interested in finding the exact line where you have both maximum advertising revenue and maximum engagement... which is a euphemistic way of saying "we want to trap you in our platform for as long as possible so we can make as many ad dollars on you as possible". That's bad! Even the value you're supposedly getting--the content--is now geared towards making you watch more ads instead of whatever you thought you were getting (sober political commentary, funny dance videos, makeup tips, whatever). This perfectly diagnoses the slop of media these days; I think there's no real disagreement here.
Finally, I think advertising is just 100% weird on its own. It sounds innocuous, but the business of advertising is persuasion: fine at the "marketing grad out of uni" level, real terrifying at the "billions of dollars convincing people to buy things they don't need and feel things they wouldn't otherwise feel about 'brands' or issues" level. There is no real regulation of this either; companies can spend as much money as they want literally blanketing our buildings, skies, cars, and media broadly with their message, which can be things like, "Happy Mother's Day" or "don't be a sucker: buy Bitcoin". This is also pretty bad.
Maybe jumping right to "let's ban all advertising" isn't the right way to start this conversation. Fair enough. But I do think we're starting to come around to the notion that advertising as we know it today isn't a good idea and we should do something about it.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23910631/telly-free-tv-a...
Not to mention the interesting question of what happens if you're just starting out and you aren't making FAANG-levels of money yet? Is your content free? Should there be some big pool where this is being paid out of?
Germany has VG-Wort, which is private entity that collectively handles licensing-payments for authors. If you sell a printer, you could potentially print out copyrighted materials with it, so the law demands you to pay them some tiny amount for the possible infraction, and they will distribute it among their members according to the type and reach of their texts. That could work, but it doesn't make things simple.
Then there's things like content-pass which offer this model. They are integrated into the GDPR-consent, and you can pay 2.99 (or so) a month to bypass ads & tracking on sites that use it. I work in affiliation, and everyone I know who uses it only does so because it's a convenient way to enforce consent on GDPR banners because you're technically offering an alternative. If lots of people were to go that route, they'd have to increase the monthly price to make it unattractive. I know one site who built it themselves and set the price to $99/m, and had some stressful evenings when they actually got a person to buy to it, because they didn't consider that someone would. That person is still paying for their content as far as I'm aware.
The media-consumption-increase incentive you mention is definitely a problem - but is it new? I'm not sure. Even if you pay for a magazine which has no ads (I do!), if they are driven by commercial interest (the one I subscribe to isn't really), they'll try to make sure that you're deriving as much value from it as possible so you don't question your subscription - and the best way to ensure that is probably to make sure you read it front to back. At the same time, if you read it front to back, it did give you something, right?
I definitely see the point with Youtube & similar where they might figure out the minimum quality required for you to keep watching and aim barely above it, never really satisfying you, but keeping you entertained just enough so you don't leave. In the end, I think you'd still derive value from it, or you'd quit it - even if that value is small -- an sometimes, someone's life might leave them in a place where mindless distraction is valuable enough to them.
> There is no real regulation of this either; companies can spend as much money as they want literally blanketing our buildings, skies, cars, and media broadly with their message
Why don't they? If it was a clear way into peoples minds, I'm sure they would. But maybe it's more of a sustainability issue -- if you overdo, you'll turn people away (who wants to go into an inner city where you're screamed at from all sides?), if you underdo it, you're not maximizing your messaging potential. So I'm not sure they can increase it without limit - not to mention that they'd need to pay _a lot_, and there's no guarantee they'd make that money back.
> But I do think we're starting to come around to the notion that advertising as we know it today isn't a good idea and we should do something about it.
Maybe, I'm not sure. I'm probably less affected by it than most, because I do use an adblocker, I do use sponsorblock, and I avoid places where ads make economic sense (lots of people to see them). I'm probably still getting some of it, but I'm largely not being targeted because I'm part of very small subset of the population that is weird and there's much more to gain from targeting the rest.
Ultimately, the line between product information (30 years ago the ads in an IT magazine I read were often just price lists of available products; very useful to me, but undoubtedly an ad) and advertisements is very fuzzy. I think you'd have a much easier time regulating away unwanted behaviors in ads like we do for some industries (e.g. pharma, or finance, you can't imply that there's no risk), which doesn't automatically kill the useful bits but can still curtail the unwanted stuff.
Ultimately, limiting screen time for children and others who find themselves unable to control their use is probably more helpful, because most ads today are on screens. Who sees those billboards while staring at the cell phone?
Also: Even alternatives to YouTube will end up in the ad market. Just see the different streaming services where one already pays and who are rolling out ads. And well, YouTube still is the central place with all the videos. The only choice I have is using an ad blocker, which could be seen as amoral.
When you say it is “not practical” to go to the town hall, what you are really saying is “my time is valuable and I want someone else to expend their valuable time recording that information and disseminating it to me at low or no cost to me”. Believe me, I understand the desire. But if we were all honest, someone has to pay for this and capitalism has decided that this is the “best” way to do that.
Plutonium is one of the most niche things ever. All humans and businesses desire human attention, whereas virtually nobody desires plutonium.
The amount of people who can do anything with it amounts to likely 0.000001% of the population.
This is not a good rebuttal.
> Human attention is scarce.
Compared to what? Do you mean limited, highly desired, or what? Also I'd say there's 8 billion human attentions. That doesn't sound scarce to me.
> Demand for that attention is endless.
"Endless"? Surely not. What if I have it all?
> Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default
Doesn't this mean almost everything we care about is a market? The supply of almost everything (actually everything?) is limited, qed right?
> meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely (vs just regulating with guardrails).
I don't think this means anything. What's an example of using brutal authoritarianism to disrupt other markets?Cocaine? Human organs?
> Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity.
Again if there are any concrete examples I would imagine most people would agree that stuff should be banned.
> Instead of something that attempts to land on fairness (even if imperfect), no market at all guarantees unfairness.
Wait I thought scarcity + demand poofs a market, how can there be scarcity + demand and no market? Isn't this the foundation of your argument?
> Advertising puts a price on the scarce commodity of attention in broad strokes,
The strokes are way too broad. If you're a magazine or a road sign, you're selling the slice of attention you're getting, which isn't anywhere near the whole attention market. Even if you're something like FB or TikTok, you're max getting like 70% of someone's attention. But then is influencer placement more effective than movie product placement? What about an interstitial ad? Blah blah blah. What happens when people are offline, like making breakfast or reading a book (things lots of people still do, believe it or not). This is a market in such a loose sense it loses meaning, but the worst part is the people who own attention aren't getting paid! At least in a human organ market I get cash for my kidneys. Where's the site I can go to where I just watch ads and rack up sweet cheddar?
> and it not always, but generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising).
"Value" for who? You've done no work to establish the value of advertising to the audience. Again, less of a market and more of a sheep shearing operation.
> But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
You might be surprised to learn there's a pretty rich diversity of advertising bans. Here in The Hague we ban ads for meat and fossil fuels. Things are still OK!
Why should I be allowed to sell my attention any more than I can sell my own kidneys? It's even worse because I let other people sell my attention for me and get nothing back. What point are you trying to make? The market for manipulating my behaviour shouldn't exist at all so I really don't care how efficient it is
> the highest value messages for both the audience..
Obviously not. If this was true then people would pay to see more ads and everyone knows that doesn't happen
Interesting, I perceive it exactly the other way around. I'm surprised this thread is as high up as it is, usually as per my perception, anti-advertisement sentiment gets shot down hard, presumably because a large part of the HN-crowd works for companies like google or facebook which rely on ads as a business model, or start-ups whose products are only used because users were shown ads for them.
My take: The human mind is hackable; it's just too easy and efficient to appeal to our emotions and most basic instincts. And while it was mostly fine to ignore it while it was "only" increasing consumerism, we currently see what happens when the same is applied to elections, with predictably terrible outcomes.
Your stance is still the old HN stance; the market actually works, any change that would impact the status quo is neither welcome nor needed, etc. etc. - this was the gospel for at least a decade, but we're finally awakening to the fact that hey, maybe this is actually bad, even if it made loads of money for many of us. Maybe it led us to the awful situation we're currently in, with big, ad-based monopolies, an absolute clownshow in the highest of offices and CEOs of said monopolies playing the lackeys.
Most big social developments in human history were non-serious and silly to many people before they actually happened.
I don't know if I go that far. I can see arguments for both sides of the issue. And at the same time, I know it would be impossible to do, but I could see that not having advertising would fix a lot of problems in our society. And yes, advertising is a broad term. Maybe we have clear rules around what's advertising and what's propaganda.
> you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely
I'm not usually a fan of brutal authoritarianism, but you're making it sound pretty good.
I am willing to give you that there is hatred. I don't know if it is violent, but there is actual hatred. I do not believe it is misguided. As the OP mentions, a lot of people on this site saw how the sausage is made.
<< Human attention is scarce.
True, but each ad makes it even more scarce as humans instinctively try to filter out noise suggesting that ads do not belong in our vicinity.
<< Demand for that attention is endless.
I disagree, but I do not want to pursue this line of argumentation, because it is a deep rabbit hole with a lot that can trip it ( and I sadly do not have time this Sunday ).
<< meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely
You may be onto something. Current breed of corporations are effectively nation-states that require focus of an entity nearly as singular. Hmm.
<< no market at all guarantees unfairness.
Meh, I saw the fairness and I think I am ok with its absence from the world at large.
<< generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation
Hardly, "make your penis bigger" likely being most obvious example.
<< please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes.
I think you are misunderstanding something. The reason OP even considers such a drastic move is because throwing the baby out with the water is easier than attempt at gentle removal. I will add one more thing though. I was in a meeting with non-technical audience yesterday and, oddly, advertising and face tracking in apps came up. This is all starting to trickle down to regular people, which does suggest some level of correction is coming.
<< we should regulate advertising to ensure it doesn’t get out of control
It is already out of control, but adtech managed to normalize it.
<< But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
Hardly, maybe you could argue for freedom of association as we are talking mostly third parties, but the business would still be able to huff and puff as much as they want.
This logic is just bad, plain and simple. You know what else has a high demand? Drugs.
So I guess fuck it, right? Sell heroin in Walmart, who cares. It's a "natural market". Of course people want to shoot up, it feels fucking amazing and humans are hard-wired to do shit that makes them feel good.
So let's just give up and do nothing. Yeah, in fact go ahead and advertise heroin on TVs. Yeah, go ahead and give it to infants too, let's get them young. After all, it's a natural market or something.
Please, I am begging you, stop bending over so severely for "markets". Sit back, and think about consequences.
If something ONLY HARMS PEOPLE, why are we doing it? Seriously, if everyone is a loser then why are we here? We don't have to make life hell just because capitalism would like it! That's a choice!
Please explain with examples from nature.
Your argument begs the question. Attention is indeed scarce, but that's because ad tech has created an attention economy.
Assuming that advertising is the best use of human attention is - how can I put this politely? - really quite eccentric.
In nature there is limited access to food, water, mates, and shelter.
Economizing is the process of dealing with scarce resources.
Nature doesn't do markets. We do. If you apply market thinking to the wrong things, bad things happen. You don't serve the market. The market serves you.
No.
> Nature doesn't do markets. We do
Yes. It’s a social tool for coping with scarcity. Violence is another.
Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge cases that are tricky, but overall the situation doesn't seem too fraught.
How would you do that?
How exactly would that work?
So they'll only ban non-political advertising... until they decide your movement isn't political for the purposes of the laws. It's too obvious, and too tempting, a cudgel for any government to have.
---
The way we reign in government isn't by having no rules (the argument you're making reduces to "any rule can be weaponized against political opposition"), it's political checks to ensure weaponization doesn't happen. Or put another way, there is no system of rules that constrains a regime defined by its rule breaking.
Though I could imagine only official debates and no other communication allowed would be a no advertising approach
That's likely to be the case anyway, because politicians are rarely willing to restrict themselves. The US Do Not Call list has an exception for political spam.
(See also: why the two biggest political parties are unlikely to support better voting systems.)
Am I an ad?
The United States government is not allowed to regulate commerce unless it is interstate. So it defined interstate commerce as anything that substantially affects interstate commerce. Did you cut down a tree in your backyard and use it to make your own pencil with your own labor? That kept you from buying a pencil that might have been made in another state. Interstate commerce.
Did you just represent an idea, and did I pay you with my attention? Advertising. Prison.
> Yes.
> The United States government is not allowed to regulate commerce unless it is interstate
This does not state that the Federal Government cannot define what is legal and illegal. This is done pretty regularly. 24 states have legalized weed and 39 have made it available for medical use, YET it is still illegal under federal ruling and these dispensaries get raided by Federal Agents routinely. There is no violation of the Constitution here.
I'll admit that my previous comment was quite terse, but I make a better point over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43606823
And remember, law doesn't work like code. It needs to be interpreted with intent. The letter of the law is imprecise and is not meant to be absolute. If you know what someone means, don't derail the conversation as if you have a gotcha. You're welcome to request better language, but you don't "win" by misrepresenting what is well understood. We're trying to communicate, not exploit software.
> 24 states have legalized weed and 39 have made it available for medical use, YET it is still illegal under federal ruling.
Congress at least has to pretend it has enumerated powers and is using them, most of the time, "promote the general welfare" notwithstanding. So do you know the basis for that federal "ruling"? Smoking weed, including weed grown in your backyard, substantially affects interstate commerce.
EDIT for source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/801
> And remember, law doesn't work like code. It needs to be interpreted with intent.
Is this not my point rather than yours? Open the door for ill intent and the imprecise nature of the law means that the first people with ill intent will exploit it.
"Congress shall make no law" is not a rule we can use for absolutely everything, of course, but where it does not exist, Congress historically shall pretty much inevitably make a law. So the answer to "is my unpopular speech advertising if adverting can be regulated?" is "yes." Of course it will be regulated. Others have pointed out that this applies to lots of laws, not just speech, to which I say... yeah?
Well, I suppose that's one loophole.
It isn't as if companies can't hold rallies.
It isn't as if flash mobs don't exist.
And "spreading your message"... what do you think going viral is, exactly?
What is "viral marketing" to you?
Except by tricks "well, you provided free coffee to your volunteers, that's a form of payment, you're all going to jail".
Look, it's a radical idea and on its face, all at once, is impractical at the moment. So I suggest rather than pointing out the myriad of holes like shooting fish in a barrel, you give it the benefit of the doubt and roll around the ways it could work in your head. And what your online/offline experience would be if it were even 10% effective.
It already is that effective in a lot of the world with stricter advertising laws, and as a Canadian I do find the levels of advertising in the us landscape to be jarring. So there are examples
Strict regulation of ads is one thing, outlawing advertising is another. There are places that don't allow billboards and other street-level advertisement, but that's a long way from outlawing advertisements in general.
I get that it's a nice idea to many, but I follow a general rule of adding extra skepticism if the problems of some approach are absolutely obvious and the response to pointing them out is "don't worry about, that'll sort itself out, let's just do it". Especially when the collateral damage might be huge and the energy feels like "this will save us".
All Advertising is Marketing, but not all Marketing is Advertising.
I think the distinction should be thought of as Marketing (not Advertising) is to inform customers that opt-in to the information. Usually, marketing (excluding the Advertising arm) is for the benefit of a willing participant, where-as Advertising is for the benefit of both the willing participant and also the Advertiser (& advertising media) against an unwitting participant/user.
An example could be a product, company, political candidate's website that has a calendar for upcoming events, information pages about the product, etc. This can include tacky graphics and UI/UX, or even strategic language to stand out and show "personality". What it can not have are advertising boxes for unrelated advertising injections that the user did not go to the website to learn about. That would then be a Marketing site with banned Advertisements. The same for the Marketed product, they can not Advertise on unrelated media; basically inserting itself against the users will (the Advertised product being placed/injected/"forced" upon the person/user).
How exactly does it work in other countries but the US?
There's very little outside advertising in Sweden, for example, and mostly restricted to cultural advertising. Road shoulders belong to Traffic Authority, and all advertising and billboards are banned there, so you won't see the insanity pf billboard after billboard here.
So how did Sweden do that? By political will and persuasion perhaps?
Political advertising also adheres to certain rules. And while there's a lot of it in a few months before elections, it's still surprisingly contained compared to some countries
On the motorway there’s signs for services (rest stops) with all the major brands logos on, and maybe one or two billboards every 30 / 40 miles outside of city centres, then more as you come into a city centre.
I’ve also recently noticed a massive vertical screen on the side of a building near a busy interchange in my city (Manchester).
Public transport is littered with small adverts - on underground’s / metros there’s a lot of posters on escalators and buses have a lot inside, plus usually a big banner on the side (or a full skin of the bus but they’re fairly rare at least in my city).
Political advertising is capped at £20 million per party, but our newspapers do most of the real political propaganda come election time in terms of what stories they cover / who they endorse in their editorials (or sometimes they allow a major candidate to write one). The BBC also lets all parties with some traction do a 5 minute party political broadcast.
When I’ve watched some live US TV channels I’ve been amazed by how many “Vote X for Y, paid for by Z PAC” adverts there are and am thankful UK parties can’t spend anywhere near the same amount.
Here in Canada it is illegal to advertise tobacco products. It is also illegal to target young children with toy ads, etc...
So far no one objects, on the contrary. No one wants to overthrow our government because they deem it totalitarian or think it curtails free speech.
So... one more data point.
(Billboards also also reasonably good as sound reflectors, reducing the highway noise in the community if positioned properly.)
I have driven/travelled across a lot, nearly all, European countries and the other one - the UK.
You do not get those huge screens on stilts anywhere that I have seen in Europe, that seem to be common across the US.
To be fair, I've only driven across about 10 US states. However, I do have Holywood's and other's output to act as a proxy and it seems that US companies do love to shout it from the hill tops at vast expense and fuck up the scenery with those bill board thingies.
Try driving around La Toscana and say Florida. I've done both, multiple times and I'm a proper outsider. I love both regions quite passionately but for very different reasons. FL has way more issues in my opinion but we are discussing bill boards so let's stay on task.
Billboards require power as well as the obvious physical attributes. They are an absolute eyesore and in my opinion should be abolished. Turn them into wind turbines and do some good - the basics are in place.
However. I know FL quite well. It has a lovely climate (unless it is trying to kill you). Florida man almost certainly invented air conditioning and FL man being FL man took it to the max when confronted with a rather lovely climate.
FL man is a thing and it turns out that CA Pres. can be weirder than anything seen before.
US - remember your mates, we remember you as is and don't hold you accountable for going a bit odder than usual for a while.
This reminded me of learning the Hollywood sign was literally an advertisement (shouted from the hill top) that turned into a cultural landmark
On to the point for the topic, parts of Asia (mid/large cities) are overwhelming with their advertisements which I don't think the US or EU/UK can compare either
My first thoughts: You might be able to make those bill boards synonymous with imperialism of some sort. That gets you loads of negative connotations for free.
... also not far from the truth.
Digital billboards, sure, but traditional static billboards only need power if you want to light them at night. My guess is the majority of billboards in the US are unpowered, since it's so much cheaper. (Though likely not the majority if you weight by daily views.)
If we ban billboards at least the the countryside will look nice
Advertising already makes extensive use of astroturf campaigns and product placement.
Cable TV started out with no ads, as a major selling point over broadcast TV. Then they started advertising because they figured they could make more money that way. There's no reason to believe that advertisers will ever refrain from introducing ads when there's money to be made by doing so.
So banning billboards makes advertising less efficient. In theory, anyway.
I'd much rather be fed efficient advertising on a billboard than have to worry about more astroturfing, that stuff is insidious. Cure substantially worse than the disease once advertisers have to deceptive and have even bigger incentives to hide than they already do.
And much as the anti-ads people want to skip the point, nobody ever even established that advertising is a negative thing that advertisers need to be harmed for.
Know what we have instead?
Peace.
Then put them in jail, that's why we've built them.
Sadly, a post titled "A proposal to restrict certain forms of advertizing", and full of boring rules will be much less likely to get 800+ points on HN.
something like 80+ percent of texas cities ban them or are phasing them out with heavy new restrictions.
for example, in dallas, if you want a new billboard, you have to tear down 3. and new ones have placement and size restrictions.
houston is no longer allowing any new off premises signage including billboards. the only way to erect a new billboard is if it passes permitting and the company tears down one of their old ones.
and like i said, like 80% of texas towns across the state have heavy restrictions on new or outright ban them.
santa fe effectively has a ban on all off premises advertising which obviously includes billboards.
billboard are banned on highways in the entire country of Norway, including urban/suburban highways.
the entire state of vermont.
the entire state of maine, including cities.
all of washington dc, including georgetown.
I've seen Billboards in Honolulu, Houston, Dallas, and Washington DC within the past 2 years. I haven't been to Santa Fe recently but they had billboards the last time I was there.
In many places where these signs are banned, old grandfathered-in examples have become beloved heritage landmarks.
The musée Carnavallet in Paris has a fascinating exhibit on the city's history based entirely on old business advertising signs.
An example here in Vancouver: https://vancouversun.com/news/whats-the-future-bow-mac-sign-...)
I detest a lot of modern forms of advertising as much as the next guy, but at the same time I think we'd be choking off a lot of interesting and enriching human expression by trying to remove it entirely.
Just because it was done in the past, and is interesting to learn about, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t outright ban it.
All-or-nothing thinking is so common in HN that it’s seriously over-complicating simple problems by trying to find a perfect solution. Such an ideal solution is rarely necessary.
Why have I not heard about this. Is this a recent thing?
Seems you're insistent on letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is precisely why judges exist. It would not be difficult to define Ads well enough to cover 99% of current advertising. Sure there will be gray areas. Advertisers will adapt. But it would make it profoundly more expensive, difficult and risky.
I'm not sure I understand a concrete economic argument other than "anything which makes it harder for businesses to be wildly profitable off minimal value hurts the economy". But that only really holds of you define the economy by things like GDP, which really just capture how wildly profitable companies are and have almost no bearing on quality of life for the people; in other words, the argument is circular.
Assume paying for others to advertise for you is illegal. What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right?
What about them wearing a sign so they don’t have to shout? Driving with a sign on a car?
Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that.
How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line?
I am not an advertising apologist. I hate ads with the power of a thousand suns. I use an ad blocker. But this idea of making advertising illegal is just a non-starter. It goes against the basic tenants of freedom of speech.
> What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right?
That is (or should be) prevented by laws against disturbing the peace or similar. Which is more along the lines of reasonable solutions in general. Banning advertising wholesale seems impossible, yes, but regulating the actual most common mechanisms of selling ad spots is much easier.
> Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that.
You're paying somebody for the distribution of the ad embedded within/alongside content (websites) you don't own.
> How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line?
Posting on Facebook is clearly distinct from paying Facebook to promote your ads.
I think we can narrow down on weird cases in between the carsigns and the websongs. Maybe the line gets muddier if the employees aren't driving their own cars with signs, or if those employees are hired to do nothing but drive, or if they're not even employees and they're Uber drivers but for driving signs... To me, that last one sounds like a platform which exists for nothing but advertising.
FWIW, that’s not entirely accurate. The tenets of free speech include a long list of exceptions. In the US, commercial speech and specifically advertisements do not necessarily have free speech protections, by design, especially when it comes to false advertising, misleading advertising, and anything else ads might have that is on the list of exceptions including IP, defamation, and false statements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
No ads in TV programming. No product placement in movies. No billboards. No subway or bus station advertising posters. No paid recommending of specific products. No promotional material for products - nothing with fictional elements. No web ads. No sponsored links. No social media ads. No paid reviews.
(you could still do some of those covertly, with "under the table" money, but then if you caught you get fined or go to jail)
No tracking consuming preferences of any kind, not even if you have an online store. Just a database of past purchases on your own store - and using them for profiling via ML should be illegal too.
If people want to find out about a product, they can see it on your company's website (seeking it directly), or get a leaflet from you. In either case no dramatized / finctional / aspirational images or video should be shown.
>And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
You're removing cancer.
Last time I checked, a product label (on the product or on the package) is not an advertisement. It's just the name of the product and/or brand, and maybe some lines about what it does. Even if you call a product label "a sort of an advertisment" it's fine.
When people complain about advertising today, do they refer to product labels? Or to their friends telling them about a product? If not, why are you bringing this up?
>Am I allowed to tell my friends I like a product? What if I put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it?
Sure, as long as you aren't getting paid for doing it (directly or via affiliate kickbacks). If you are, and you're discovered, you pay a fine - or go to jail.
You try to paint a "it's impossible" all or nothing scenario around marginal advertising and edge cases. Doesn't matter. If we can get rid of 90% of overt advertising - tv ads, streaming ads, posters, billboads, radio jingles, that's enough, even if "you put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it".
This would result in a better world still, without the authoritarian system you describe. No need to get it perfect the first try, just start small.
For an example of this in action, drive through any of the US states that do not allow billboards.
Modern prosperity is caused by modern policy. I've seen some reasonable theorising that income basically comes from how easy it is to do business (thinking especially of https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation). Which is linked in no small way to the cultural factors chgs pointed out - the most vibrant and high income industry in the world is also the one that sees laws impeding them as a problem that can be overcome.
The attitude of doing things that create wealthy even if NIMBYs object is an attitude that leads to wealth creation. Strange but true. Not the only factor, the political strength of the opposition matters a lot too.
The US in particular benefits from an absurd amount of resources (not least of which is land), a perfectly safe geographic position, the global language and an immigrant culture. Basically able to coattail the British after independence, the destruction of much of Eurasia during WWII cemented its position as first. And great diplomacy, including the Marshal Plan, enabled the US to create an international system with many benefits and natural synergies with its inherent strengths.
The only thing special is our geography and history. It's really hard to launch an attack unless you're in Canada and Mexico. So the US smartly made treaties and agreeemtns instead of repeating the bloody history Asia and the now EU went through as they constantly battled neighbors.
Only Australia has such a similar advantage and instead they had to war with nature's deadliest critters trying to kill them (they arguably lost).
I mean sure, in the 50s the main driver of prosperity was whether a country had avoided being invaded and that isn't necessarily a result of a country's legal system. But the 50s was a very long time ago now and the era since then has been quite equal-opportunity outside pockets of disaster in Africa and the Middle East. The USSR, Chinese, Euro and US experiences haven't been determined by external factors or historical determinism as much as internal policy choices made in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s with a 20-30 year lag before the decisions start to turn up in real life.
Even if we indulge in wild conspiracy and pretend there is a shadowy cabal in Washington that decided to crush the USSR and exalt China economically, that cabal would have had to implement its decisions by somehow guiding internal policy choices in the respective nations. Nobody has managed to do anything to either of them through external pressure that holds a candle to the internal choices made.
This isn't some piece of rigidly-defined software instruction that also is somehow write-once execute-forever amend-never.
If it also results in all the social media influencers behind bars, then its a double-win.
The Fairness Doctrine was only for broadcast TV under the theory that the people owned the airwaves. Also this is not 1980. Anyone can get worldwide distribution of their ideas out.
The "problem" is that everything is vying for our attention because the internet made it vastly cheaper for any random joe blow to force a set of pixels in front of our faces.
That's the distinction. If I can't ignore it, then it shouldn't be legal. Companies should have no right to my attention.
If you live in a conservative state, what are the chances that they say advocacy for Planned Parenthood is advertising and say that advocacy for pro-life is freedom of religion?
And how would that work over the Internet? Are you going to block foreign websites?
I can give you a real world example. Florida requires age verification for porn sites. Sites not based in the US including the ones owned by MindGeek just ignored it.
A nonsensical argument. You might as well ask how "Oh yeah, you want to ban murder? Well how would you like it if conservative states say that abortion is murder, and killing negroes isn't? Clearly outlawing murder is unworkable."
Great job pointing out that laws can be misinterpreted by motivated judges, I guess we should get rid of all the laws then to make sure that doesn't happen.
Even if abortion is murder is objective based on the state laws. We see right now how government controlling speech that it doesn’t like is harmful.
Again I’m amazed that people want to give the government more power unnecessarily seeing the current abuses of power and how it is used to punish people the government doesn’t like.
We should limit the power of the government to only punishing things that infringe on our rights and our person.
There are many different ways humans can die and many different types of human involvement in sequence of events. This involvement is sometimes characterized as a causal contributor to death. Responsibility in a related death, is not objective. You are simply incorrect.
Homicide is objective. Murder is unlawful homicide and therefore subjective.
I'm amazed people pretend like corporations having immense power isn't a problem at all. I want the government to reduce the power of corporations to invasively and pervasively manipulate me through intrusive advertisements.
>Again I’m amazed that people want to give the government more power unnecessarily s
Well we've done a horrible job self-regulating. This abuse of power also teaches us that ideas without enforcement is just daydreaming. If that all you wanted to do in this article, go ahead.
We are currently also doing a horrible job at eating correctly. Do you want the government to regulate how much we eat to?
No, actually, it is. Speech involving transgender individuals is being restricted.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/nhl-womens-history-junior-range...
References to trans people have even been scrubbed from NPS pages about Stonewall. It's heinous.
> And how would that work over the Internet? Are you going to block foreign websites?
We just address the big platforms. No need to be exhaustive in the first attempt.
Why wouldn’t the same happen to more mainstream sites.
Do we also ban Netflix and other streaming services from having an ad tier? Do we make all search engines and other content providers for pay?
How do broadcast companies make money without advertising? Do we want the government funding and controlling content?
And services like Netflix losing an ad supported tier is just like... Netflix in 2021. I fail to see that as alarming.
Websites that do not have any European presence could care less about EU law. I just gave a real world example of what’s going on in the US right now. Florida has a law that says porn sites must have age verification. Xvideos completely ignores the law.
But back to Google, if it weren’t ad supported, does that mean minors couldn’t use it or the poor? Right now, poor and even homeless people can get smart phones for free with data (or use WiFi) from the government.
Would people he don’t have home internet access who can now go to the library not use Google if they don’t pay for it?
Are you familiar with broadcast TV that is supported by "viewers like you"? And historically TV advertising was banned until the FCC allowed it. And you do realize that news used to be paid? You'd be surprised that... people used read the newspaper with their morning breakfast, which cost a few cents and was delivered by a paperboy.
Really, you're trying to imply that society wouldn't function without advertising- when it was the default until the last 100 years or so. Perhaps you should watch Mad Men on HBO, which depicts the 1960s era when sociopaths of the advertising industry decided to redefine advertising as a necessity of modern living.
> Right now, poor and even homeless people can get smart phones for free with data (or use WiFi) from the government.
If the government is willing to subsidize Google Android phones running on a network like AT&T or T-Mobile for poor people... what's to stop the government from also subsidizing Google Search for poor people as well? It's not like Google's gonna care much about poor people, people who are that poor tend not to be good advertising targets anyways. The juicy ad market is elsewhere. Similarly, have you gone to any library recently? Libraries already offer stuff like access to a NYTimes or WSJ subscription, or even things like LinkedIn Learning. Adding Google to the list as another subscription that they offer to library card holders for free is a nonissue.
Honestly, it just sounds like you've been brainwashed into being unable to visualize a society without advertising.
Frankly, nobody gives a shit if EU or whatever websites continue to do their thing. US porn sites have negative political capital anyways, XVideos continuing operate as before impacting the US porn industry would make any hypothetical law EASIER to pass, not more difficult.
I’m old enough to know that even in the 80s Mr. Rogers was in front of congress asking the government not to cut funding because some conservative congressmen were opposed to some of the content.
And the actual phrase was “… and viewers like you”
PBS always had corporate “sponsors” they announced during pre or post show credits just like NPR does today. Corporate “sponsors” are just advertisers by a different name.
How do you think the current administration would think about PBS supporting gay pride month or Black history month? Would the current government help fund HBCU libraries or would they come under their “anti DEI” crusade?
> And historically TV advertising was banned until the FCC allowed it
This is not true. The earliest TV and radio broadcasting companies were advertising supported.
> You'd be surprised that... people used read the newspaper with their morning breakfast, which cost a few cents and was delivered by a paperboy.
And those papers still had advertising. The subscriptions never paid the total cost of newspaper publications
> when it was the default until the last 100 years or so
Coca Cola has been big in advertising since it was first incorporated in 1880s. Are you saying there was no advertising 100 years ago on media that didn’t exist like the radio, TV and internet?
> what's to stop the government from also subsidizing Google Search for poor people as well
You mean the same government today that is rewriting history, purging government websites and has a list of words that agencies can’t say? You want that government having more control of private speech? Or would you prefer the last government who also pressured private entities not to publish things that went against the government narrative about Covid? Even though now we know some of the things that they suppressed was true.
I don’t mean the anti-vax stuff. I mean the government wouldn’t admit for the longest that immunity from the vaccine waned and you needed another shot after six months even though other government’s health agencies started recommending them.
> Adding Google to the list as another subscription that they offer to library card holders for free is a nonissue.
And then also those sites that Google is linking to? What are the chances that the government allows libraries to pay for content that the government disagrees with?
Would the current government pay for access to Fox News and The Guardian or just Fox News? Today the government is withholding funding from colleges that don’t toe the line and says things it disagrees with. Oh yeah and deporting protesters who are here legally. This is the government that you want paying for and controlling content?
> Honestly, it just sounds like you've been brainwashed into being unable to visualize a society without advertising.
Well seeing that you are factually wrong about history and ignoring what the government is doing right now when it comes to making sure that only its views are heard….
And I’m bringing up porn because porn websites are regulated today heavily in some states and one of the most popular sites overall which is not hosted in the US is completely ignoring it.
As far as sites with negative capital, in todays client, any site that is pro-Palestine, LGBT, minorities, anti Musk/Trump etc not only has negative capital, it’s actually been pressured by the government and news organizations are already capitulating.
Exactly. Congress funding something tends to produce better work than corporate advertising funded stuff. Look at NASA, or national science grants, or Mr Rodgers as a comparison. Subscription funded media and Congress funded media being available, are you seriously saying Marlboro sponsored shows are better as an alternative?
> TV advertising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_in_television
https://www.strategus.com/blog/the-history-of-commercials-an...
"1941: The FCC lifts its ban on TV advertising, and the first commercial airs"
> And those papers still had advertising. The subscriptions never paid the total cost of newspaper publications
No, that was not the case until the advent of the penny press of the 1830s. Before the 1 cent penny press, standard newspapers cost 6 cents per paper and was not mostly funded by advertising, although they had small amounts of advertisements. They would have survived just fine if advertising was banned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press "The main revenue for the penny press was advertising while other newspapers relied heavily on high-priced subscriptions to finance their activities."
> 1880s
I would consider that roughly "100 years or so" ago, within the correct amount of sigfigs. It's certainly closer to 100 years ago than 200 years ago. And even if you did bring up examples from 150 or 199 years ago- so what? The point is that advertising started its dominance during this century or so, quibbling over a few decades is pointless.
> You mean the same government today that is rewriting history, purging government websites and has a list of words that agencies can’t say? You want that government having more control of private speech?
Yes. Unashamedly.
Your line of thinking is how we got Citizens United. Your line of thinking is imprudently painting all government action under the same brush, where state propaganda is conflated with things like banning money in politics or banning billboards. Hint: banning advertising looks a lot more like an anti-Citizens United good thing, than some 1984 Ministry of Truth.
> Would the current government pay for access to Fox News and The Guardian or just Fox News?
... you can literally just go look for yourself? https://www.nypl.org/blog/2017/09/25/magazines-and-newspaper...
Here's government funded access to paid newspapers. The Guardian is literally already included in here.
> Well seeing that you are factually wrong about history
No, you're the one who's confidently incorrect.
I don't see how you reached this conclusion, unless you think advertising/propaganda yields bet positive outcomes more than net negative, which seems contentious.
Here's one way it could be false: the wisdom of the crowds only really works when groups of people independently reach their own conclusions, because people who don't understand an issue are randomly distributed around the correct answer and so they all cancel each other out, leaving only the people who do understand an issue to cluster around the correct decision.
Propaganda/advertising works directly against this, thus undercutting the usefulness of the wisdom of crowds.
It's hilarious that you think that advertising is actually necessary for economic prosperity. If anything, it's probably a net drain on it.
TV brands can be set up in a department store? Like we’ve done for ages?
A major challenge in journalism is because of the collapse in value of banner ads. No one but the very largest newspapers have sustainable businesses in the United States and they only do because of the critical mass they have reached with subscribers.
It seems rather certain an end to advertising would mean the death of lots of low-quality "media".
Some kind of micro-transaction system is needed for this, so that I can easily buy just that one review.
It'd be a very different world, I anticipate a lot of paywalls and secret deals.
One of these is good and one is bad.
If humans can't decide, we can train a LLM to be the arbiter.
You nailed it man. My first response even to the headline let alone the article was to reflect on the first line spoken by my professor in my first marketing class: "Marketing is about educating the consumer." Advertising is just one way we attempt to do that, and taken to an extreme, I have no idea how you could ever make it stop. The article is clearly focused on one part of advertising, but even then, someone will always build a better mousetrap.
Almost everyone can tell when they’re being advertised to. And almost everyone can tell when they advertise. Effectiveness of such bans would depend on enforcement, the definition is clear enough.
It really isn't though. There's so many different forms that we can't reduce it to "I know it when I see it" territory and depend on case-by-case enforcement.
Do we ban outdoor billboards? Product placement? Content marketing? Public relations? Sponsor logos on sports uniforms? Brand logos on retail clothing? Mailing lists?
I do love the idea, but doubt its feasibility. Implementation would have to be meticulous, and I expect the advertising industry would always be one step ahead in an endless race of interpretation. We can still try to curtail the most disruptive forms though, we don't have to destroy all advertising at once to make a positive difference.
Content marketing, public relations, mailing lists - no
"we don't have to destroy all advertising at once to make a positive difference"
No sponsored advertising. At all.
If advertising "skirts through the loopholes", fine - at least we'll recognise it as underground (like darknet now). The liberal version, I don't even understand how you got there so won't comment. That was wild.
And you seem to ignore the issue the OP mentions about not being able to unilaterally disarm.
It's easy if you try. But you won't try ... what a shame.
You don't define "advertising". You look for things that advertisers do and see if they can be made illegal or unprofitable.
Formula 1 cars used to have displays for tobacco products. At one point, the law in Europe started saying "you can not do that", so tobacco advertisements disappeared.
There should be a limit on the quantity of advertising. Limited to like 100 people a day on average. We already have anti-spam laws.
There would still be advertising but it would be from people from your own communities instead of big corporations.
So I'm listening to the radio, and one minute I'm hearing someone on NPR (or an equivalent public broadcaster) explaining how to make my back healthier; the next minute there's someone trying to convince me that some product will make my back healthier.
Which one is advertising and which one is not?
> that SOME PRODUCT will make my back healthier.
Is it really that tricky?
This is not an impossible problem. It doesn't need to be perfect, and we can iterate.
This is just the perfect solution fallacy.
Nobody in this conversation thinks there's a set of laws that would work perfectly to prevent all advertising. That doesn't mean it can't be a hell of a lot better than it is. Playing whack-a-mole with loopholes and making careful regulations to avoid inhibiting human rights is still a huge improvement over letting corporations trample human rights at will.
It's worth analyzing why a society wants that and who benefits from it.
The article almost explicitly states that this is precisely the goal. We all understand who those populists in 2016 are, who "bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences".
So I think we are not talking about authoritarianism here, but full-fledged totalitarianism. Such a policy is a powerful lever of control, allowing government to obtain even more levers. And in the end people still vote "wrongly" (spoiler: they are voting "wrongly" not because of some Russian advertisement on facebook), but the government at that point will not care anymore how people vote because that will not affect anything.
I've been on the advertising, is an evil parasite around useful transactions bandwagon for a while and thought this was really hard to define properly.
So far my best take is around that what's good is being discoverable instead of something that you run into. This allows people to do what they want, without the evil side of unconsciously or in-competitively driving them to your business/deals.
We don't need to 1984 listen to every conversation for any hints at product endorsement. We can start with obvious things - for example, prohibiting a company from spending money on marketing. Banning ads on the air, whatever.
There's levels to this. There's really evil slot machine marketing. You know, try to get people addicted to your social media and use that addiction as a way to generate profit. And then there's not so bad marketing. Like my friend telling me he likes his new pair of pants.
Demand-side is a mess and hard to draw the line. It’s not a perfect / good thing, it’s a feasibility thing.
With all the modern techniques (used by neurosciences) in the modern advertising is pretty all entrainment and brain washing at this point any way. So no harm in making all that illegal. I'm pretty ok with a world with no advertising, and just function by word of mouth and network of trust.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
What is your evidence that there is any economic advantage at all to have unregulated advertising?
I'm fairly sure advertising is regulated in all sovereign states. And I am also quite certain that the jurisdictions in which gambling advertisement is illegal fare better economically than those in which it is illegal. It only makes sense: gambling is not productive, the less of it you have the better your population spend their money on productive things, the more advertising you have the more people spend on gambling (otherwise what is the point of advertising?), if you forbid gamling advertising there will be less gambling advertising (if not, what is your complaint even?).
Nothing about this statement of yours makes sense.
> I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
I don't know, in my country advertising tobacco products is forbidden since at least 20 years, how did they pull this magic trick?? go figure
This is why every time you go to the shops you have to carry your own standard weights and balance scale! The idea that society could regulate the weight and volume of every product in every shop is simply preposterous!
We can draw the line between an aggressive blow and a firm handshake. We can distinguish that.
We will figure out how to distinguish manipulatory mindfucking from regular conversation too.
a) did not exist 100 years ago
b) can be limited in effectiveness by removing that technology
Does advertising confer an economic advantage?
"How do you define it?" is an oft-repeated and weak argument against regulation used by online commenters who likely are defending a self-interest in maintaining tha status quo behaviour of so-called "tech" companies.
Online advertising services are obviously capable of being defined as these are bought by advertisers and sold by so-called "tech" companies every day. These so-called "tech" companies define "products" and "services", offered for "free", all the time. The commercial purpose is facilitation of online advertising. This can be regulated.
Before the internet was opened to the public, commercial use was prohibited. Today, HN commenters would no doubt try to suggest that defining what is and is not "commercial use" would be "impossible". But it's too late. It was already done.
The uncomfortable truth for so-called "tech" companies is that _any_ regulation that affects the ability to collect data, conduct surveillance and assist the injection of advertising into people's "user experience" could have a significant impact on their "business model". Hence they try to argue _any_ regulation is unworkable. All-or-nothing. Perfect, 100% solution or nothing at all.
But regulation does not have to define _all_ advertising. It may only define advertising that meets certain criteria. All-or-nothing thinking is nonsensical in this context. By analogy, when so-called "tech" companies propose alleged "solutions" for privacy issues, do they propose one solution that offers total, complete "privacy". How do we even define "privacy". What they propose is usually some incremental improvement.
It is possible to limit online advertising through rules and regulations. Of course this is a unacceptable proposition for so-called "tech" companies. Their only viable "business model" depends on usurping the bandwidth of internet subscribers for surreptitious, unwanted data collection, real-time surveillance and online advertising.
Cigarette advertising “bans” are not legislated, IIRC, but a result of the various consolidated settlements of the 1990s-era lawsuits against the tobacco companies. They’re essentially voluntary, and it’s not obvious that a genuine ban would survive constitutional scrutiny. It might: Commercial speech is among the least protected forms of speech.
But at some point a line is crossed: Painting “Read the New York Times” on the side of a barn you own is bread & butter freedom of expression.
Okay, then don't make that illegal.
I don't understand this mentality of "everything is the same as everything else so we can't do anything".
Sure, it's all just scale. But scale matters. Scale is why I can do a science experiment at home and it's cool, but I can't make a nuclear warhead. Seems for just about everything we've been able to find that line and work around it. This "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" approach to society is toxic, and we need to stop.
Sure, there will always be bad cases and loopholes - even bans on murder don't work 100% - but there's a reason "bans" are still a viable mechanism.
Fraud, threats, impersonation, etc etc.
There is such a disturbing element of society that seems to want to "save democracy" by any means necessary. By "save democracy" they mean get the election results they want, in other words it has nothing at all to do with democracy.
They just want power.
"We should ban advertising so the people I agree with can have absolute power" is really what these insane people are saying.
It's quite easy though. Just remove incentives to advertise. Remote the possibility of profit. Will it destroy the economy? Of course, but the advertising will cease.
I grew up in a communist country. There was some advertising (in TV, radio, magazines; very little outdoor), but since all the profits went to the state anyway, there was no real competition, and also often shortages, the advertising was not really serious. It didn't influence people a lot. It was harmless.
Of course there was a lot of communist propaganda in the media, in the schools and workplaces, outdoor banners etc., and that is advertising too. But also this was already at the stage when nobody took it seriously anymore.
> I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
What? I have world peace on my devices right now with the help of Ublock Origin.
If my county bans billboards, as the county next to me have, I will see no ads except for on paper I choose to.
Yet, in some countries advertising for tobacco or alcohol is banned, if it's possible to ban these advertising for these product why would it be impossible to ban every advertising.
> And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
Uh? You can advertise in these other nation but they also won't be able to advertise in your country, so I don't understand your point.
There was no point advertising because there was no competition, all the companies were nationalized and no matter how well or badly they did - their employees earned the same. If you persuaded people to buy your washing powder instead of the other available washing powder - that just means the queues for your washing powder will be longer.
There was A LOT of communist and anti western propaganda tho. But no advertising is perfectly possible.
For example, for banks appear problem, people avoid to pay credits, so need some enforcement - powers approved confiscation of property to pay credit, but with exceptions of unprotected people, so bank cannot confiscate from pensioners, when child registered in property, and few others, so literally huge percent of citizens now protected from banks, and this new law is step back, not progress.
What? How? Advertising isn't a good or service. About the only way I could see it economically being damaging is if you subscribe to the "broken windows" theory of economics.
No, it doesn't actually, it does the opposite. It's attempting to make you less aware of what's available outside of the monopolies, because the monopolies shove the barrel and there's no room left.
If you take a walk through town versus watch TV for a day you will get a completely different view of what products and services are out there. This mentality is exactly why small business continue to struggle - we're made to believe they don't exist because of advertising.
The reason this works is because the human brain is pretty stupid and it can't keep everything in it all at once. You also don't get a choice in what you remember, your brain does that without your consent. So you see McDonald's 1000 times and your local butcher shop signage 5 times and you'll remember one, but not the other.
Further, any store will be pretty highly incentivized to provide a quick list of goods or services offered and likely the prices (most already do this).
I don't need the same ad repeated 20 times to know that Ford sells cars and trucks.
Not only that, but the Ford ad of a vehicle driving cinematically across a landscape before disgorging a laughing and implausibly photogenic family does nothing to inform you about the relative merits of the vehicle. Anything specific mentioned in the advert is as likely to be flimflam or only technical truth as not, so nothing mentioned in the advert can be taken as useful purchase-informing fact without further research.
To put it another way: where i live, ads for cheese or meat are non existent (while ads for fast food or cigarettes are very common), and yet i know that those products are available on supermarkets or other food stores. And i can find cheeses and meats of many brands, qualities and prices on those stores.
I don't see how having ads for those things would be an improvement. In fact, i suspect that ads would be used to convince people to buy products of less quality, or downright toxic, as seen on the rampant fast food and cigarette ads.
Can you imagine a realistic way around this issue?
Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy. Getting rid of a billboard for something I am never going to buy sounds great, but it kinda sucks for the person who actually is interested in the thing that billboard is advertising. Even if there were some type of advertising that provided no benefit to any part of society, the restriction on the freedom to communicate those advertisements is something that harms all of us.
Sometimes the part of building a better world that takes the most effort is recognizing where we already have.
I would argue that paid advertisement is a force distorting free speech. In a town square, if you can pay to have the loudest megaphone to speak over everyone else, soon everyone would either just shut up and leave or not be able to speak properly, leaving your voice the only voice in the conversation. Why should money be able to buy you that power?
why shouldn't it?
If somebody believes that their message is important enough to outbid everybody else, their message ought to be the one that is displayed.
Sometimes (often?) people with a lot of money may not believe in speech but in suppressing speech. However, money should not allow for suppressing speech, for example by buying a giant megaphone and speaking over people.
By your logic paying people $500 to heckle at your political opponents rally is fine. It may be legally okay, but it is a moral hazard, and for a better society we should try to better distinguish between “free” speech and “bought and paid for” speech.
The reality is that more often than not these messages are self serving and profit driven, many times borderline fraudulous in claims or questionable at best
the reality is that all messages, even those you think ought to be a grassroots message, are all self-serving. It's just self-serving for you as well as the message deliverer. And those "advertising" messages are self-serving, but not for you (or your tribe).
Therefore, this is just a thinly disguised way to try suppress the messages of those whose self-interest does not align with your own, rather than an altruistic reason.
and it also sucks for the billboard's location owner, who is drawing a revenue from it.
People who proclaim that doing XYZ to make the world better, is not really considering the entirety of the world - just their corner. To claim that it would make the world better, they must show evidence that it doesn't hurt somebody else (who just happens to be in a different tribe to the proposer).
And it’s kind of great for the (dozens, hundreds, thousand, millions) of people to pass by the location who don’t have some eye soar blocking their view.
Your argument is basically that there are some people who benefit from advertising—I promise you anyone antagonistic toward advertising has considered this fact.
and yet, the apparent disregard for the interests of those currently benefiting from advertising is dismissed as mere trifles, not worthy of compensation.
Policy suggestions should not be so one sided. I would always use the veil of ignorance, and ensure that any policy suggestion go through this retorical device.
It is not equally likely you will benefit from advertising as it is likely you will be harmed by advertising under a veil of ignorance scenario.
I simply hate been manipulated.
So much so that I forget what the modern tech landscape is like for the average user til I use one of their devices.
We’ve (collectively we for techies) helped create a dystopia.
Of course it's not always possible, but it would be ideal to use services that don't have advertisements for anybody.
I am happy to pay for an ad-free version of a product I want but I will never use your product if I cannot block or remove the ads.
When I visit my parents it's eye opening how much advertising they're bombarded with daily.
To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"
It would? I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to craft or enforce (probably not constitutional in the US).
The very nature of advertising is it's meant to be seen by as many people as possible. That makes enforcement fairly easy. We already have laws on the books where paid advertising/sponsorship must be clear to the viewer. That's why google search results and others are peppered with "this is an ad".
> To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"
Except drugs/alcohol can be consumed in secret and are highly sought after. The dynamic is completely different. Nobody really wants to see ads and there's enough "that's illegal" people that'd really nerf the ability of ads to get away with it.
There's not going to be ad speakeasies.
But let's consider the other side of this:
> I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to [...] enforce
Suppose we consider the narrowest sort of thing we'd get the most benefit out of prohibiting, like memecoin pump-and-dump scams, which are wildly profitable for the promoters but provide no benefit at all to the buyers, so nobody goes looking for. We can get a preview of what that prohibition would look like by looking at the current state of affairs, because those are already illegal.
And what we see are fake Elon Musk live streams with deepfaked mouth movements, fake Elon Musk Twitter accounts that reply to his followers, prominent influencers like Javier Milei for no apparent reason touting memecoins they claim to have no stake in themselves, prominent influencers like Donald Trump touting memecoins they openly have stakes in, etc. I haven't heard about any memecoins making ostensibly unpaid product placement appearances in novels or Hollywood movies (probably crime thrillers) but it wouldn't surprise me.
How about sports stars? Today it's assumed that if a sportsball player is wearing a corporate logo, it's because the company is paying him to wear it. Suppose this were prohibited; players would have to remove or cover up the Nike logos on their shoes. Probably fans would still want to know which brand of shoes they were wearing, wouldn't they? Sports journalists would publish investigative journalism showing that one or another player wore Nike Airs, drank Gatorade, or used Titleist golf balls, and the fans would lap it up. How could you prove Titleist didn't give the players any consideration in return?
A lot of YouTubers now accept donations of arbitrary size from pseudonymous donors, often via Patreon. In this brave new world they would obviously be prohibited from listing the donors' pseudonyms, but what if Apple were to pseudonymously donate large amounts to YouTubers who reviewed Apple products favorably? The donees wouldn't know their income stream depended on Apple, but viewers would still prefer to watch the better-funded channels who used better cameras, paid professional video editors, used more informative test equipment, and had professional audio dubs into their native language. Which would, apparently quite organically, be the ones that most strongly favored Apple. Would you prohibit pseudonymous donations to influencers?
Commercial advertising is in fact prohibited at Burning Man, which is more or less viable because commerce is prohibited there. You have to cover up the logos on your rental trucks, though nobody is imprisoned or fined for violating this, and it isn't enforced to the extent of concealing hood ornaments and sneaker logos. But one year there was a huge advertising scandal, where one of the biggest art projects that year, Uchronia ("the Belgian Waffle") was revealed after the fact to be a promotional construction for a Belgian company that builds such structures commercially. (I'm sure there have been many such controversies more recently, but I haven't been able to attend for several years, so I don't know about them.)
Let's consider a negative-space case as well: Yelp notoriously removed negative reviews from businesses' listings if they signed up for its service. We can imagine arbitrarily subtle ways of achieving such effects, such as YouTube suggesting less often that users watch a certain video if it criticizes Google or a YouTube supporter (such as the US government) or if it speaks favorably of a competing service. How do you prohibit that kind of advertising in an enforceable way? Do you prohibit Yelp from removing reviews from the site?
Hopefully this clarifies some of the potential difficulties with enforcing a ban on advertising, even to people who don't want to be advertised to.
Listings that consumers actively seek are quite different from messages and content that companies try to place in front of people who haven’t asked for them.
It would seem both easy and reasonable to craft a law that bans advertising without banning listings of products and companies, product search engines, etc.
> How do you prohibit that kind of advertising in an enforceable way?
This seems similar to suggesting we shouldn’t ban e.g. price fixing or insider trading because they can be hard to detect and enforce.
That’s a fallacy. Most companies do not want to break the rules and risk enforcement (especially if the penalties are high), and a significant reduction and increase in subtlety of advertising would still be valuable.
I can't help noticing that you haven't ventured to attempt it in your comment. Why not?
> Most companies do not want to break the rules
This line makes me wonder if you have ever worked for a company. This is occasionally true of some rule, but only when it's the companies that break the rules that go out of business. In environments where the only survivors are the ones that break the rules, eventually most of the remaining companies do want to break the rules. Since enforcement is never perfect, in competitive markets, most companies want to break the rules just slightly: enough to compete effectively but not enough that enforcement makes them unprofitable.
It isn't that we couldn't get rid of memecoin ads, but rather that twitter simply doesn't have almost any incentive to crack down on and prevent these sorts of ads. Attach a fine with some grace period and I can guarantee you'll end up with twitter looking into ways to block spammers to avoid being penalized.
I also don't personally mind shill reviewers mainly because they are often exposed anyways and become easy to ignore. Doesn't mean you couldn't enforce an ad ban still, but it might only catch the bigger names.
I'd also posit, though, that ad mediums would be far more effective. For example, banning commercials in videos would be and easy enough law to craft and enforce that would make video sites a lot more pleasant to visit.
A ban wouldn't need to be perfect to be very effective at making things better.
I will grant that companies would lobby hard against an anti-advertising bill (which means it'll likely never pass). That doesn't mean you couldn't make one that's pretty effective.
But, again, the nature of advertising makes it quite easy to outlaw. Unlike bribery, where a congress person can shove gold bars into their suit jackets in secret, advertising has to be seen by a lot of people to be effective. Making it something that has to be done in secret will immediately make it harder to do. The best you'll likely see is preferential placement of goods in stores or maybe some branding in a TV show.
I think the same is probably almost true of advertising, though maybe societies without money such as Tawantinsuyu are an exception. But I don't think you can have merchants without advertising, because, like fraud, advertising is so profitable for merchants that they will do some of it despite whatever laws you have.
Just because some corruption always will exist, doesn't mean that there aren't societies which have enforced laws that are more or less effective.
This binary thinking doesn't need to happen in a policy discussion. We don't need a perfect set of laws or rules to make things better. We don't avoid having a law just because someone will violate it. For example, a speed limit is still valid to have even though most people will break it, some egregiously so. DUIs laws are useful even though people still drink and drive.
It just so happens that with advertising we can be particularly effective at curbing the worst offenders. That's because advertising is most effective when it's seen by the largest number of people. I don't really care if a company tries to skirt an anti-ad law by paying an influencer millions to wear their product, so long I'm not forced to watch 20 minutes of ads in a 20 minute video. An anti-ad law would force advertisers to be subversive which is, frankly, fine by me. Subversive ads simply can't be intrusive.
What you seem to be missing is that, in the end, it's all about risks vs. potential gains.
As it stands, advertising is relatively cheap and the only risk is to lose all the money spent on it.
Once it's made illegal, that formula changes massively since now there's a much bigger risk in the form of whatever the law determines - fines, perhaps losing a professional license or the right to work on a certain field, or to found and/or direct a company, perhaps even jail time!
You're right, it will probably still exist in some ways in some contexts. I bet it wouldn't be nearly as pervasive as it is today though, and that's a win. And if it's not enough, up the stakes.
Separately, I was saying that we can't usefully debate the pros and cons of such a vague proposal. You can postulate that some sort of vaguely defined prohibition would have no drawbacks, but any concrete policy proposal will in fact have drawbacks, and in some cases those will outweigh their advantages.
> I was saying that we should consider the possible enactment of such laws in the light of the knowledge that people will try to circumvent them and will sometimes succeed
That should always be the case when discussing any laws. If you don't consider that people will try to circumvent them, there is no point in considering punishment for when they do, and ultimately there is no point to the law.
> rather than assuming that, if advertising is prohibited, there will be no advertising.
As above, I would expect no one to make such assumptions.
> Separately, I was saying that we can't usefully debate the pros and cons of such a vague proposal.
I don't see why not. I suspect most proposals and ideas start vague, and by discussing their pros and cons and further refining them, we get to more concrete, more actionable ones.
> but any concrete policy proposal will in fact have drawbacks, and in some cases those will outweigh their advantages.
This is a truism, I'm not sure what value it adds to the discussion.
And FFS let's skip past the childish "how will people find out about products???" nonsense. You're an adult, use your brain. Consumer Reports exists, and in the absence of advertising that sort of content would flourish.
If only 80% of advertising were illegal, probably Consumer Reports could continue to exist, although they would be exposed to some legal risk of being ruled to be illegal advertising, probably prompted by a letter to the Attorney General from a company whose products they reviewed poorly or neglected to review at all. Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.
But possibly you are thinking of a different structure of regulation than I am, rather than just failing to think through its unintended consequences. It's impossible to tell if your proposal stays so vague.
I never complained that you didn't make a policy proposal, so you can't say I'm a hypocrite here. In fact, I've been pretty clear in other comments that it's foolish to hold HN comments to the level of legislation.
> If only 80% of advertising were illegal, probably Consumer Reports could continue to exist, although they would be exposed to some legal risk of being ruled to be illegal advertising, probably prompted by a letter to the Attorney General from a company whose products they reviewed poorly or neglected to review at all. Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.
Straw man argument extraordinaire. Nobody is calling Consumer Reports advertising. On the contrary, I'm saying that independent review isn't advertising.
> But possibly you are thinking of a different structure of regulation than I am, rather than just failing to think through its unintended consequences. It's impossible to tell if your proposal stays so vague.
So maybe ask a question instead of assuming what I'm envisioning. Believe it or not, you're not obligated to guess what I'm thinking!
Legislation could pretty explicitly allow for independent reviewers: that's explicitly the solution I'm proposing to the lack of information.
> Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.
Sorry, which commenter is proposing that independent reviewers can't be in contact with companies whose products they review?
In my thinking, companies would be explicitly allowed to submit their products for review, although I think I'd want the reviewers to still pay for the products (i.e. not receive them for free or at a discount).
Which was obvious at every step of the journey. Google was, is, and always will be an advertising platform. Advertising was, is, and always will be the manipulation of human emotions and desires for the purpose of corporate profit. This is not a good thing! How did you ever justify this to yourself?
I’ve had recruiters push the poker machine jobs, the ad jobs, the high frequency trader jobs… You get to look at the business before taking the job; work for better people. No shade on anyone who’s there because they just need a job, but if you have a choice, pick something better.
We would no longer be tricked into buying a bunch of crap that doesn't make us happy.
But because GDP is what it is, we will have a recession. Quite a big one, because a lot of the economy is reliant on selling people stuff they could do without. Perhaps people would be happier once things settle down, but we have locked ourselves into measuring things that are easy to measure, and so we're all going to think it was a failed experiment.
While we're at radical thought experiments combine that with "what if any entity worth over 100 million (insert arbitrary limit here, perhaps what if it was based on an multiple of average employee salary) was disallowed".
And, in fact, if the maximum company size were limited, and thus the marketplace wasn't a swimming pool full of whales, but instead full of a much larger number of a broader mix of smaller fish, what would advertising look like then?
For example, large categories of industry would have to change hugely into cooperative non-owning groups of smaller companies. Would they still have the same advertising dominance, or would the churn within the groups break things up?
But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable. Having a dynamic limit of total comp would mean they either take less money and put it into the company, or raise the wages of those employees.
But even in the strict context of the experiment for very heavy industry, like a steel mill or chip fab, they could be co-operatively owned in whole or by parts.
You could also extend the experiment to allow capital assets to be discounted, or allow worker-owned shares to be discounted. So you can get big, but only by building or by sharing, respectively.
Obviously the big industries today would not be possible as they are structured. But what would we get instead? Would the co-operative overhead kill efficiency dead, or would the dynamism in the system produce higher overall efficiency and better worker outcomes than behemoths hoarding resources and hoovering up competition? And if no one can be worth over 100 million (say), what would that do to the lobbying and deal-making system at the higher levels? One 10-billionaire would have be be replaced by 100 people.
So you get the main company with salaries from $1m-10m, they subcontract their operations to a company with salaries of $100k-1m which manage the cleaning contracts, and the people doing the work are just gig workers on less than $10 an hour.
But the main company doesn't have the CEO:worker imbalance
I have wondered before about restricting a company’s diversity. Effectively giving a time limit after a company over a certain size develops a new line of business by which it must be spun off into a new company. Say 12 or 18 months.
For example, Apple would have been allowed to develop and launch Apple Music but it would have been forced to spin it off.
The rule would need to be carefully crafted, and would need regulators to be active in enforcement as it would require interpretation to be applied (similar to how anti-trust works today, perhaps).
Large companies diversifying is the unnatural thing. Why on earth should Apple do music, or Amazon do video? It's manipulating their monopoly positions, it's almost inherently anti-competitive, etc.
Just because antitrust in the US at least is so wimpy (exclusively looking for "consumer harm") there's no reason sane antitrust couldn't also protect ... competition itself, in the form of smaller players etc.
I don't think there's a single industry that merits the bloated conglomerates that rule the earth today, whether it's mining, autos, chips. It's just that capitalism inherently centralizes, and capitalism runs the show.
They're not the same mechanism, they're the same thing. Propaganda is advertising one doesn't approve of, and advertising is propaganda that one does approve of. The fine-slicing is the result of people who want to make money doing propaganda attempting to justify themselves.
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow.
Through what mechanism? Wishes?
I'm getting annoyed with people who made a bunch of money in advertising talking about banning advertising (or in general people who made a bunch of money in X trying to create careers as X-bashing pundits or gurus.) Advertising has a purpose; it's how I find out what products and services are available, and at what cost. People working in advertising who don't realize that have clearly never given the only honest aspect of their occupation a moment's thought. They thought the job was to distract people while robbing them. From that perspective, I can understand why they now think that they themselves should have been banned.
If you want to ban advertising, you have to replace advertising. We have a highway system, there's no reason why we can't have a state products and services that are available system, or in the same vein a matchmaking system between employees and employers. We don't, though. Banning advertising without one would be like banning Human Resources departments without any other hiring process.
What we should do is regulate advertising, since is is commercial speech and we can, but we don't do that either. Talking about banning advertising when we can't even ban direct to customer drug advertisements (which can be easily done, as it was done, by creating standards for the information that has to be included with a drug advertisement, and the format that it has to be done in.) We can't even get the basics; banning advertising, in addition to being a bad idea, is a pipe dream.
When I am unable to avoid it (which I’m relatively successful at), it’s how I explicitly decide what to avoid. See an ad, penalise the company.
But yet I have no trouble finding and evaluating products when I actually need something.
Search engines, real and virtual marketplaces, word of mouth, reviews all exist already, and all can work without paid shenanigans.
There’s no need to replace advertising, we can just ban it.
But how do you separate advertising from product recommendations? Would it only apply if the person doing the recommending is getting paid for it?
I totally relate to the “I’m OK with certain types of advertising” angle here.
And yes, some people do try to push it, renting space to park their hay carts that happen to have their business information on the side.
But you know what? Those cases eventually get dealt with too, and overall, the law is a complete win, even with a few people testing the line.
The fact that the MTA is now plastered in flatscreen ads is an example of huge overreach, and also an example of how better funding for public utilities like the subway eliminate the "need" for advertising that the MTA claims.
Unfortunately, this is the system working as designed per the capitalists. Underfund public utilities to make the public more dependent on the for-profit private sector. Banning ads is communism for this mindset.
A new law is proposed and people may break it in the future. Is that a reason not to implement that law, because that seems to be the - in my view crazy - insinuation.
On the flip side, we've had many thousands of years of adversarial training, so it's not as if protections don't exist—at least for a very classical modes of attack.
Even when we can use that awareness to notice the times that we're being manipulated and try to remind ourselves to reject the idea that was forced into our brain surveillance capitalism means that advertisers can use the data they have to hit us when they know we're most susceptible and our defenses will be less effective. They can engineer our experiences and environments to make us more susceptible and our defenses are less effective. They're spending massive amounts of time and money year after year on refining their techniques to be more and more effective in general, and more effective against you individually. I wouldn't put much faith in our ability to immunize ourselves against advertising.
Humans don't have those protections. Although, ego deludes oneself to believe they do. Ask anyone if they are susceptible to advertising. Maybe 1 in 5 have the humility and awareness to state the truth.
I do not trust my in-built protections, so I’d rather not be exposed in the first place.
It's not hackable so much as it lacks resistance to environmental noise.
What if we outlawed surveillance capital instead? "Ad tech" is about exploiting information about individuals and their actions, what if that part of it was illegal because collecting or providing such information about individuals was illegal? (like go to jail illegal, not pay a fine illegal).
By making that illegal, collecting it would not be profitable (and it would put the entity collecting it at risk of legal repercussions). "Loyalty cards", "coupons", "special offers just for you", all gone in an instant. You could still advertise in places like on the subway, or on a billboard, but it would be illegal to collect any information about who saw your ad.
If you're over 50, you probably read a newspaper. And in reading the newspaper might have looked at the weekly ad for the various supermarkets in your neighborhood. That never bothered you because you weren't being "watched". The ad was made "just for you" and it didn't include specials on only the things you like to eat. When read a magazine you saw ads in it for people who like to read about the magazine's subject matter. Magazines would periodically do 'demographic' surveys but you could make that illegal too.
Generally if you're under 40 you've probably grown up with the Internet and have always had things tracking you. You learned early on to be anonymous and separate your persona in one group for the one in another. That people have relentlessly worked to make it impossible to be anonymous angers you to your core and their "reason" was to target you with ads. By maybe that it was "ads" was a side effect? That is probably the most effective way to extract value out of surveillance data but there are others (like extortion and blackmail).
I resonate strongly with the urge to slay the "Advertising Monster" but what I really want to slay is how easily and without consequence people can violate my privacy. I don't believe that if you made advertising illegal but left open the allowance to surveil folks, the surveillance dealers would find another way to extract value out of that data. No, I believe choking off the "data spigot" would not only take away the 'scourge' of targeted advertising, it would have other benefits as well.
I have long thought advertising is the new smoking. One day we will look back and be amazed that we allowed public mental health and the wellbeing of our civilisation to be so attacked for profit.
I also manage to fairly easily live a life in which I see remarkably little advertising.
* I use a suite of ad/tracking blockers
* I don’t use apps that force ads on me
* I watch very little TV, and never watch broadcast TV
* I live in the UK which has relatively little outside advertising, and I mostly get around by walking/cycling (thus avoiding ads on public transport)
* etc…
It astounds me when I speak to friends and travel just how pervasive advertising is for some people, and particularly in some places.
The US, for example, is insane. I can see how some people used to living in such an environment may think it’s not possible or reasonable to get rid of advertising, and for sure there will be edge cases and evasion, but my experience is that it really wouldn’t be so hard to dramatically reduce the amount people are exposed to.
I too use ad blockers and privacy protectors, and people are constantly trying to get around them. THAT behavior should be outlawed I think. If I'm choosing to use blockers and you don't like that, then deny me your website. That's your choice. Deploying exploits so that my adblocker doesn't work? Or convincing the people who wrote browsers that adblockers are theft? THAT is bad behavior (again in my opinion of course).
Advertising is virtually impossible to stop, but more than that, is not inherently evil. Most countries include laws on how you can advertise. For example, you can't lie and make a claim that your product can't live up to, you can't use certain words or phrases, and you have to have disclaimers in some situations.
In the mid-90s when Yahoo was a young company, they had a simple advertising model. The ad would be placed next to the section of the site relevant to the category. If you were searching for watches, a watch ad would be next to it. The advertiser would know how many times the ad was served and how many times it was clicked on.
They didn't have deep demographic data like they do today.
The surveillance capitalism model is the predatory model. Advertisement is only one part of that industry.
With that, let me outline where I think proponents would argue there is a benefit
- Consumers get "relevant ads".
If an ad company knows you're in the market for a new grill, it's better for them to show you advertisements for grills than for soap. The argument made here is that the consumer wastes less time, has less of an issue with ads (since they're relevant) and is better informed (arguing that ads are a form of information).
- Advertisers waste less money
The argument here goes that an advertiser who puts out an ad on TV or a magazine only has some vague notion of who the audience is. If they know who they want to target to buy their product, they don't to spend money advertising to people who aren't going to buy their product.
- It lets smaller advertisers come in for a niche audience
Let's imagine that your product or service is very niche. You're likely to have less resources to spend on advertising, and you need to make your ad spending count. With surveillance capitalism and targeted ads, you can reach your target market.
I don't personally view these benefits as outweighing the net negative of the incredible amount of information collected on people and the way this information is used not only to get people to spend more (since that's what advertisement is) but also for psychological and even political manipulation as we saw in the last US election where different people would be shown customized ads to stir up their fears and doubt.
Allow browser plugins that collect allowed data and send it to this database for advertisers to use for targeting. Let local code determine what I send, not an external entity.
Give the web an advertising standard that only shows approved data when you choose to link your unique ID with your current ID. Make this link severable.
Hell, you’d have people signing up for the advertising and targeting if we knew it wasn’t going to be abused and effectively the only digital advertising legally permitted. The problem with the current system is consent.
But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.
This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they would not have paid otherwise, Y higher than X, otherwise there is no reason for this company to pay for advertisement. Yet everyone is saying "yeah, advertisement, I don't care, I just ignore it". Surely it cannot be true.
Conversion (getting someone to purchase) at scale with ads is not so simple as person sees ad, clicks, and buys. There are many steps along the funnel and sometimes ads can be used in concert with other channels (influencer content, sponsored news articles, etc). Within direct ads you typically have multiple steps depending on how cold or warm (e.g. have they seen or interacted with your content previously) the lead is when viewing the ad and you tailor the ad content accordingly to try to keep pushing the person down the funnel.
Generally if you know your customer persona well and have good so-called product-market-fit, then (1) you will be able to build a funnel that works at scale. So then (2) the question is does the cost to convert a customer / CAC fit within the profit margin, which is much more difficult to unpack.
However, it's worth keeping in mind that digital ad costs are essentially invented by the ad platform. There is a market-type of force. If digital ads become less effective and the CAC goes too high across an industry/sector, the platform may be forced to reduce the cost to deliver ads if the channel just doesn't make enough financial sense for enough businesses.
All this is to say, the system does/can work. Tends to work better for large established companies or startups with lots of funding. In general, not a suggested approach as a first channel for a small startup/small business. Building up effective funnels is incredibly expensive and takes a lot of time in my depressing personal experience.
Would you say that it indeed means that if ads are banned, the money to support news, tv, youtube, ... will still be there? I would think that in fact, there would be even more money for news, tv, youtube, ... as the ad company will not take their cut of the money.
Edit: Now that I'm thinking about it, ad may also work in directing expenses that would have been done anyway. For example, if I have 10 companies A, B, C, D, ... all selling the same kind of product, then it is possible that 1000 persons that want that kind of product will all spend 100£, shared between the 10 companies. So, company A will receive 10000£. But if company A does some advertisement for a cost of 5000£, maybe people will still spend the same amount, but for their brand in majority, so the 1000 persons will still spend the same 100£, but company A will receive 20000£ because some people will buy A instead of B, C, D, ...
I'd say advertising is in good portion what creates the "want" instead of a "need". If we were to rebalance the amount of purchases driven by needs instead of wants, we'd overall reduce the total amount of purchases. Each of them would also not have the extra cost of advertising included in their price.
You seem to be assuming that, in the absence of advertising, the company will sell as much as it did before -- just with lower overhead costs -- rather than advertising driving more sales and possibly lowering costs because the company has more customers. For some items / things this may be true-ish. I'm going to buy paper towels because I need paper towels, and advertising has little influence on that -- except, maybe, which brand I buy. But I'm going to spill things, and my cats are going to keep barfing on the floor from time to time, so I'm going to need paper towels regardless. And I'm not going to buy a bunch of extra ones just because the ads are so good.
Don't get me started on soda advertising and such because the amount of money those companies spend on ads is mind-boggling and I don't think it moves the needle very much when it comes to Coke vs. Pepsi...
But, would I go see a movie without ads to promote it? Would I buy that t-shirt with a funny design if I didn't see it on a web site? Sign up for a SaaS offering if I don't see an ad for it somewhere?
If a SaaS lands 20% more customers because ads (and other forms of marketing) that's not necessarily going to mean I pay more for the SaaS because ads. It may very well mean that the prices stay lower because many of their costs are fixed and if they have 20% more paying customers, they can charge less to be competitive. If a publication has more subscribers because it advertises, it may not have to raise rates to stay / be profitable.
In some cases you may be correct -- landing customers via ads equals X% of my costs, so my prices reflect that. But it's not necessarily true.
For newspapers for instance, Exxon or Shell could be paying a lot more to have their brand painted in favorable light than the amount the newspaper readership could afford to pay in aggregate.
The same way Coca Cola's budget for advertising greenness is not matched by how many more sales they're expecting to make from these ads in any specific medium, but how much the company's bottling policy has to lose if public opinion changed too much. That's basically lobbying money.
TV would absolutely still exist, given that people pay for it and there is a big industry around ad-free streaming services already.
Non public broadcasters are rarely if ever and free. Meaning that their business model requires this as revenue to survive.
Laws can be written in a way to guarantee independence from despots too.
Idk it feels better than this whole private affair where rules are arbitrary and the only thing that matters is how many ad impressions you sell.
Right now we've already having oligarchs owning news groups and very few independent publications. But getting rid of other revenue sources won't help that situation, we'd get more Washington Post or New York Times than Buffalo's Fire.
It's a lot easier IMHO to have an independent newsroom if the business side can advertise for toilet paper and dating sites than if it needs to convince Jeff Bezos of its value to him.
And investigation journalism costs a lot while not getting valued by many, there's no way we get a set of paid-only-by-viewers papers from all relevant spectrums covering most of the news happening every day.
The missing part of this sentence is "as they exist now". There are other models that exist that could support broadcast and publications. There are other models yet to be explored or that have floundered because they've been snuffed out or avoided because the easiest (for certain values of "easy") path to dollars, right now, is advertising.
It is a pipe dream, of course -- and the author of the piece doesn't really do the hard work of following through on not just how difficult it would be to make advertising illegal, but the ramificaitons. While an ad-free world would be wonderful, that's a lot of people out of a job real quick-like. Deciding what constitutes an "ad" versus content marketing or just "hey, this thing exists" would be harder than it might seem at first thought.
And long-tail ones are the best. There are some great videos on youtube which are 10+ years old and do not have millions of views. I am sure many of their uploaders already forgot about them. I cannot see them existing without being supported by "something", and if that's not advertisement, than what?
YouTube already has subscriptions. An ad-free YouTube could extend that and maybe add lower tiers of subscriptions for X hours per month viewing. This would be a double-win, if YouTube's were centered around catering to users and not maximizing time on site with The Algorithm(TM) to ensure people see more ads -- which also encourages some of the worst content on YT.
But a big shift like ridding the world of advertising would, of course, have tradeoffs. Maybe that would be "long tail" videos on YouTube. If you can get rid of ads and have to lose those, is it worth it? Conversely, what has advertising killed off that we might be able to have again if it was gone?
Instead they want to price-gouge me for 5x that so... no thanks. I'll just use my ad blocker.
The model I understand you're suggesting is individual pricing based on usage and value as an ad target. A lot more complex and opaque than a straightforward fixed fee for all users.
Also, it's worth noting that YouTube Premium includes YouTube Music, which serves as your Spotify replacement. You might not need this, but the subscription fee covers more than just the lost ad revenue on YouTube.
I don't really recall the details of that calculation unfortunately. But it would have been based on cost per ad view (no clicks) times the number I expect to be shown in a month.
The model I'm suggesting would be more like I load YouTube up with $10 and slowly burn through it as I view videos instead of being shown ads. The cost per view could actually be just as or even more transparent. Perhaps videos are tagged with the cost to view, which could open up a whole new world of economy among creators to gatekeep with higher fees themselves if they want to value their videos at more than the default. Being transparent on pricing this way is literally using the exact same infrastructure they already use to price ads, just letting me pay the cost instead of the advertisers.
Yes.
We would lose one of the most useful tools introduced to mankind in the last 3 decades.
Good. They're but shells of themselves, eaten through and bloated up by cancer of advertising. Even if they were to die out, the demand for the value they used to provide will remain strong, so these services would reappear in a better form.
I thought people in tech/enterpreneurship circles were generally fans of "creative disruption"? Well, there's nothing more creatively disruptive than rebuilding the digital markets around scummy business models.
(Think of all business models - many of them more honest - that are suppressed by advertising, because they can't compete with "free + ads". Want business innovation? Ban "free + ads" and see it happen.)
Most people never even thought about ads that way.
For my own little part - firefox and ublock origin since it exists, on phone too. To the point of almost physically allergic to ads, aby ads, they cause a lasting disgust with given brand. I detest being manipulated, and this is not even hidden, a very crude and primitive way.
It's even worse when you can't even be detested because you don't realize it is happening.
The remaining YouTube channels would be concentrated around the ones that are of higher quality, rather than easy slop produced to push ads. Nobody would try to clone someone else's channel for money. They would only be produced by people who were passionate about that topic. There would be fewer channels by passionate people, but the percentage would be much higher, so it's not necessarily a worse situation overall.
TV has always cost money - you pay for satellite or cable, and the free-to-air programming available to you is overtly subsidized by your government - they shouldn't need to double-dip by showing ads.
We used to pay for newspaper subscriptions too. A lot of newspapers are trying to go back to that, but it's a market for lemons. Maybe if advertising was banned, we'd each subscribe to one or two online newspapers and discover which ones are decent and which ones are crap. Remember, it's harder to make someone who was paying $0.00 pay $0.01, than to make someone who was paying $10 pay $20. Would the market be more efficient at price discovery if there was no $0.00 at all?
I keep hoping that decent aggregators will emerge - or I will find the ones that exist.
I am happy to pay for news, but I cannot afford to pay for all the ones I want, and I cannot afford the time to read all I want. I would like to pay good aggregators....
I have some questions about your vision.
- How many content creators would no longer be able to make passion videos as their full-time job because they're no longer getting revenue-sharing from YouTube?
- Okay, some content creators also have Patreon etc. What's the incentive to post these videos publicly for free, as opposed to hoarding them behind their Patreon paywall?
- What's the incentive for YouTube to continue existing as a free-to-watch service? Or even at all? Take away the ad money, and I can't imagine that the remaining subscription revenue comes anywhere close to paying for the infrastructure.
Or at the very least regulate it as a utility and allow users the ability to bring in their own advertising.
I don't think that nationalizing such a service makes much sense either. What motivation does a government have to operate a service for global benefit (as opposed to just its citizens)? Surely we shouldn't want a US YouTube, a French YouTube, a Japanese YouTube, etc.
> Or at the very least regulate it as a utility and allow users the ability to bring in their own advertising.
Doesn't that run counter to the premise of banning advertising in the first place?
Why not? What's so special about having all content on the same website? You can generally only consume videos in your own language or others you can understand. There's generally only a handful of countries that speak a certain language, and aggregators would likely appear.
If each country had their own localised platform, local culture would have a much greater chance to flourish.
I know plenty of teenagers who know more about US politics than their own country's, who barely know local artists, who know certain expressions in English but have no resources to convey a similar message in their native languages.
I wouldn't mind going back to a world a little more diverse, a little less homogeneous.
Suppose that I really want to consume content from certain UK creators, but the UK YouTube-equivalent is region-locked, as much of BBC is today. That's a net loss compared to the status quo.
> There's generally only a handful of countries that speak a certain language
And there are plenty of people who speak languages other than their native one. English literacy / fluency is a de facto standard in tech, whether we like it or not. It's not a matter of suppressing other cultures, but rather providing a common language for discourse.
> and aggregators would likely appear.
I'm not so convinced. If these are services provided by governments for their residents, they're especially easy to region-lock.
> If each country had their own localised platform, local culture would have a much greater chance to flourish.
> I know plenty of teenagers who know more about US politics than their own country's, who barely know local artists, who know certain expressions in English but have no resources to convey a similar message in their native languages.
I sympathize with this concern, but I don't think that this approach is the answer.
The Internet was conceived as a network of independent nodes, all interconnected. What I said looks a lot more like what the Internet was intended to be than YouTube does.
> I would prefer to avoid fragmentation of the ecosystem, since it complicates discovery of content, reduces potential reach, limits cross-pollination of ideas, etc.
Aggregators, RSS feeds or similar, word of mouth, all those things help with relevant discovery. The YouTube recommendations algorithm seems to do less so.
> Suppose that I really want to consume content from certain UK creators, but the UK YouTube-equivalent is region-locked, as much of BBC is today. That's a net loss compared to the status quo.
Perhaps. You might also ask yourself why they are region-locked. I believe it will come down to advertisement, at least to a non-negligible amount.
In any case, I'm not saying multi-language or multi-country websites and services would be prohibited from existing, only that the likes of YouTube would probably not be as profitable and may cease to exist.
> And there are plenty of people who speak languages other than their native one. English literacy / fluency is a de facto standard in tech, whether we like it or not.
It is. And within a certain circle it's less of a problem, though sometimes it can also become one.
> It's not a matter of suppressing other cultures, but rather providing a common language for discourse.
I assume you're a native English speaker, most likely from the USA. What you call "a common language for discourse" is unfortunately exactly the suppression of other cultures. There's no way to have that common language without the language, the ideas and the very ways of thinking approaching more the one of the language that's becoming common.
The very premise of TFA shows that. Propaganda and advertisement are one and the same in some languages. And that has profound implications in how the speakers of those languages interpret the world in what pertains to these concepts. By "providing a common language" where there is an intrinsic difference between the words, that world view, the very premises of those other cultures are changed and moulded to be more similar to those of the dominant language.
The very existence of said common language makes the world less interesting, it slowly erases and erodes individualities of cultures and ultimately we as a species are poorer for it.
I don't dispute that, and it's not as much of an issue as long as they are in fact interconnected nodes, but the direction we're heading is that more and more countries are exploring China's and North Korea's model where they have their own sovereign internet. Russia, Iran, Myanmar have all taken concrete steps in the past 2-3 years, and plenty of other countries would do more if they had the ability to do so.
Like it or not, there is actually a notion of "too big to block." Most countries are not willing to block, say, all of Cloudflare's IP ranges, or all of Google or YouTube.
> Perhaps. You might also ask yourself why they are region-locked. I believe it will come down to advertisement, at least to a non-negligible amount.
In my experience, most region locks are based on either licensing deals or government regulations. That seems to be the case for BBC content:
"Programmes cannot be streamed outside the UK, even on holiday. This is because of rights agreements."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/help/questions/playback-issues...
Sure, some licensing deals are made on the basis of "who gets the advertising revenue", but not all of them (or probably most, for that matter).
> In any case, I'm not saying multi-language or multi-country websites and services would be prohibited from existing, only that the likes of YouTube would probably not be as profitable and may cease to exist.
Yep, I totally agree. As I said, "Take away the ad money, and I can't imagine that the remaining subscription revenue comes anywhere close to paying for the infrastructure." I'm not asserting that multi-country websites would be prohibited, but rather that if you push ownership onto governments, they'll prioritize their residents over any other users, and I wouldn't be surprised if said governments institute region locks (e.g. to limit serving costs).
https://linforme.files.sirius.press/files/1742914627793-Rapp...
https://linforme.files.sirius.press/files/1742914627793-Rapp...
But everything going to LLMs will make it harder to see/know about the ads. Google search was great when it first came out and then SEO happened. How long before you (NSA, CCP, big corp) can pay OpenAI to seed its training data set (if this is not already happening)?
The system can work but we vote in horrible people to execute it.
You’ll likely be pleased to hear they use the word “propaganda” for advertising in Portuguese, at least in Brazil.
Which makes it actually really hard to talk about political propaganda
In Portuguese, I never found it difficult - mostly because, as the OP suggests, there is no material difference. If you want to talk about political propaganda, either say "propaganda" and let the other person deduct from context that you mean political propaganda, or explicitly say "political propaganda" (propaganda política).
In some ways, it might even be better as it will require you to actually characterise whether you mean political in the party-electoral sense, or in the ideological sense, etc.
The first time I heard the word "propaganda" in the English language, I assumed it was a less used synonymous for "advertisement". Despite having lived in an English-speaking country for over a decade, I still see them both as one and the same.
I sometimes feel like the separation is mostly used as a means to purport corporate and commercial advertising as legitimate, good and desirable (or at least acceptable) whilst keeping the idea of political and ideological advertisement as evil.
Both are bad. Both are means to manipulate an individual's opinion in favour of the advertiser. Commercially it is so I feel compelled to trade a portion of my life and health (in the form of money that I earned through work) to them in for a good or a service that I may otherwise not have thought worth the exchange.
Politically it's the same, only this time instead of my money they want my vote or my support for a certain policy that might even be against my personal or collective interests.
It's true that "propaganda" in the disparaging sense is more applied to political and ideological messages, but you can sometimes see it used about commercial messages when the speaker believes that those messages are especially manipulative, for example when the speaker believes an industry is bad but is wrongfully portraying itself as good by covering up harms that it causes. You might hear this more in connection with an "industry" ("tobacco industry propaganda" or "oil industry propaganda"), but I've occasionally heard it in connection with individual companies. But the negative connotation is pretty strong, so some listeners might be uncomfortable if they don't share the speaker's views of the propaganda author.
One can also say that a book is propaganda in the sense that the book is dishonest and manipulative advocacy, where the author isn't showing respect for the readers.
I wanted to write something about the question of how American rhetoric (and courts) see the relative value, or relative harmfulness, of commercial versus political advertising. But this turned into a complicated discussion that I'm not sure I can do a good job of, so I'm going to hold off on that for now.
I know they do. If you read again, you'll notice that my point was not that they don't care about the negative connotations of the word "propaganda". It was that having a separate one for "advertisement" serves as a way to accept the latter as benign.
I would love your input as someone on the inside. My understanding, broadly, is that when there’s commercial advertising, it goes through a different channel; there’s an auction, the ad is marked, CTR is tracked etc. whereas I think the political polarization and the use of propaganda on social media happens much less explicitly: it’s “mixed in”with the non-ad content that’s posted, and therefore much harder to detect or remove.
I’m also curious how you might handle influencers. Those, like propaganda operations, are an attempt to influence people’s behavior but “from inside” the ad/non-ad boundary.
And then, I’m convinced, a lot of our politics today is simply an emergent phenomenon of the algorithmic feed. That there is no master, corporate or political, that lead to this condition. It simply happened as a result of “for you.” (I think this is changing, as the powerful are discovering how powerful the algorithm is at influencing their subjects).
I think I agree with you broadly. The total sublimation of human relationships and interactions into “the machine” has a whole host of really bad side-effects. Jacking into cyberspace causes the shakes, at a society wide level and certainly at an individual level as well.
The main difference between advertising and propaganda is that advertising usually is obvious and loud, and in many countries is required to be declared: people need to know they're watching an ad. You have specific placements for ads that are clearly defined: tv breaks, outdoors, even banners. It's true that there are active efforts to blurr those lines, but still.
The problem of propaganda is that it's mainly being done covertly, no one is saying they're speaking on behalf of someone or of an ideology.
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow.
While this concept sounds good, it doesn't seem to work in the real world. For example, could shops have billboards on their property? What about businesses that didn't have prime locations? How would people know they existed? How would small businesses compete with big retailers?
One of the things the internet brought, for better and worse, was to lower the barrier of entry—you wouldn't need to be a massive brand that could afford to have its product placed on TV Shows or even to have sales teams selling door to door.
Limiting certain types of advertising or changing tax codes to not allow dedicating expensive could shape it in a way that meshes with society.
Trying to rein in the abuses you saw in the adtech world starts with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft being dissolved.
That implies that people want ads and they're going to be consuming underground ads from their ad dealers. Which actually already impinges on advertising because advertising doesn't want to be secret, advertising wants to be as visible or popular as possible. Advertising is inherently easier to regulate because of this.
Microsoft’s largest segment is cloud, but it doesn’t quite provide the bulk. Their ads business is small compared to the rest.
Certainly killing advertising would hurt them, but I’m not seeing a mortal wound here, so I thought I was missing something when you lumped them in.
I remember a world without advertising on the internet. Products still existed. Commerce still happened. Information still flowed. At first I got access to the internet through universities. Later I paid subscription fees for internet access. Nothing I accessed on the www required a paid subscription.
Bandwidth sucked. CPUs were less powerful, RAM and storage were in short supply. All that has changged.
But I still pay for internet access, much more than I did in the early days. And, remarkably, I see people asking internet users to "subscribe" to websites, in addition to paying internet subscriber fees. This does not stop these websites from also conducting data collection, surveillance and targeted advertsing.
Internet advertising is not like other advertising. People try to argue it makes stuff "free". Stuff that was already free to begin with.
A big reason for that is influence from Edward Bernays:
"Edward Louis Bernays was an American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". While credited with advancing the profession of public relations, his techniques have been criticized for manipulating public opinion, often in ways that undermined individual autonomy and democratic values."
Bernays' mother, Anna, was Sigmund Freud's sister. There seemed to be a talent in that family in understanding the human psyche, and how to utilize that understanding.
Advertising is just a name for a delivery mechanism for propaganda. Its not a difference of master, as is clear in the political realm where when we focus on a particular commercial delivery vehicle we talk about "campaign advertisements" but the content is still "political propaganda".
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.
No, the mechanisms would just get even more sophisticated, to work around whatever (inherently, and unavoidably, arbitrary) lines were drawn against "advertising" while permitting the flow of information and opinions about products.
Probably, but it would make advertising much more costly thus less appealing and reduce its market size. Just like for any other prohibited activity.
We still get a choice about where we work, and we could choose not to put glorified ad companies on a pedestal.
Now I would probably bend my neck and accept it. It's just not everyone has choice.
If you think deeper, to first principles, it’s clear that disease is capitalism. I am not advocating socialism/communism, but isn’t it strange that capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics? In 100 years, about 100 countries tried it, and not one country can report a harmonious society. It’s always with inequality and suffering.
Every science has new advancements and discoveries, every single one except political sociology. Why is more advanced and modern political economic system never seriously discussed? On what assumption is capitalism still being implemented? It was never working yet still it is referred as something like “word of god” that cannot be argued with.
If this was a situation in an IT company and methodology company uses constant change, it ends in disaster. After about one such cycle, management will be looking into changing processes and choosing something else instead of Agile or Waterfall or whatever is used.
For about 30-40 years now, we produce enough to feed and house everyone. Henry Ford introduced a five-day work week, which should be down to one workday by now. But instead, we got “bullshit jobs,” which are about 50% of employment in unnecessary made-up jobs to keep people occupied (marketing, finance). And still in the AI age, a person who is born now is brainwashed into capitalism and has to find an occupation, study, and work till retirement. Capitalism does not accept you for who you are. It only accepts you if you have some kind of occupation that brings value.
If taking a human-science view, then one interesting take on capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom. There can be no "science" of capitalism.
It allows the direction of excess human psychological energy. It is the absence of regulation of anti-social criminal behaviours, by creating an allowable "grey area" between moral and wicked behaviours - what so many business people like to call "amoral". But that same energy is innovative, creative - the destruction of what is old and weak is part of any finite-sized system. The need to destroy, dominate and exploit is strong in a significant percent of the population. Any decent study of criminology is continuous with "business".
William James, in The Moral Equivalent of War [0] suggested that we coped with this in the past by having every few generations of males kill each other in wars - and of course implied that it's mainly a gendered issue. During frontier times, as the European settlers conquered America and other lands, there was ample "space" for exploitation as that energy was directed against "nature" (and the indigenous folks who were considered part of "nature" as opposed to "civilisation"). Now we've run out of space. The only target left for that energy is each other.
Social-"ism" etc are projects to try controlling that nature by reducing "individualism" (and insecurity-based consumerism is an obvious first target). It's major fault is that the anti-social criminals tend be want to be the ones doing the controlling - just wearing the mask of civility and preaching the primacy of "the group".
If we cannot change human nature we must find a new outlet for that energy. Space exploration as a new frontier always looked good, but in reality it's something we are unlikely to achieve before self-destructing the technological civilisation needed to support it.
That leaves little else but a kind of cultural revolution. The pharmaceutically catalysed version of that in the 1960s is worth studying to see where and why it went wrong. See Huxley.
Any realistic systematic change would need to address this "problem" of the individual ego, creating some new focus that is the "moral equivalent" of war.
Light property ownership is when this toothbrush is mine. Normal property ownership is when my house is mine. Extreme property ownership is when your house is mine, that section of airspace over there is mine, precisely four tenths of the revenue generated by the billboards on the Eiffel tower is mine - using a heavy dose of the legal system to artificially extend the principle of ownership to all sorts of things that aren't naturally property and things that would naturally be someone else's property. This is a positive action done on purpose by the legal system, not merely natural default like me owning my toothbrush.
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Did you know one of the common pesticides in the USA but banned in the EU interferes with hormone levels in certain species, making them way more individualist? One of those species is humans. Still a positive freedom?
This is very wrong. Capitalism fundamentally requires abstract property rights (i.e. someone can own a thing they have never even held or seen, much less used), and it requires a state to provide very strong protections for those abstract rights.
In the absence of the state imposing such a property right regimen, you wouldn't have capitalism, since it'd be impossible to accumulate capital if the only way to own property is to physically use and/or occupy it.
Importantly, capitalism is not the same as free markets! Humanity has had free markets in one form or another for most of its history, but capitalism is very recent historically speaking.
The notion that socialism is always anti-individualistic is also wrong. Left-wing libertarianism is a thing, and goes back to the earliest anarchist writers (who literally invented the term "libertarian" as a political label - and they didn't have the likes of Ayn Rand in mind when they did that). There's even free-market left-wing anarchism.
Nonetheless I compare what we call "capitalism" to chameleon music artists like David Bowie (no disrespect intended to that wonderful artist), who change radically with time, constantly shapeshifting and reinventing. Our grandfather's "capitalism" is unrecognisable from its namesake today.
People often level the accusation against communism that "it has never actually been tried in practice", and I think the same is also true of capitalism. Maybe in the years before just before 1929.
Anyway, what I see today is not a recognisable ideology. It's just a bunch of criminals getting away with it and an effectively lawless USA.
2. all advertising venues (radio, web, print, outdoors) all make boatloads of money during political campaigns AND government "awareness" campaigns (which are all disguised political campaigns with tax money). most radios stations yet around, live exclusively of this revenue.
so, the system was built on the two premises you wrongly consider side effects or unintended consequences. making it illegal is the only alternative. everything else is just ignoring the real cause: it was for exactly that.
Perhaps you could turn into a subsistence farmer making every home product you own on your own or in a small commune, or perhaps you and a group of employees could buy your existing employer.
But the other more realistic method is that you would start your own business so you no longer have to work for someone else.
19% of all American adults are starting or run a business. It's a very common way to make a living.
IMO the idea of removing advertising entirely would essentially entrench the status quo even further. People would only know brands like Coca-Cola, Tide, and Apple, the brands they knew about the day the ads shut off. There would be no chance for other companies to enter markets because they would have no realistic way of spreading the word about their alternatives, not even for small local businesses.
The proposal is not just radical, it's downright moronic if you've ever been in the shoes of owning your own company.
I wouldn't be surprised if these brands are so dominant because they can afford to flood the country with ads.
coca cola is such a ridiculous product that there isn’t a situation/place/… on the planet where asking for one is odd. you can be in 876 star michelin seven-years-long-wait list restaurant as well as nastiest rats-on-your-should shithole and asking for coke would be the most normal thing
They need to remind you about them even though you already prefer them and know they exist because they want you to buy more than you would otherwise.
I still think a lack of advertising for smaller competitors really would be devastating. DuckDuckGo and Reddit achieved pretty amazing recent growth aided by major outdoor ad campaigns. These were sites that were not market leaders in their categories and had a lot of catching up to do.
This doesn’t seem correct to me.
Products would still be searchable, but the wealthiest companies could no longer pay for placement or pay to have their brand name repeated endlessly so it’s on the tip of your tongue but you don’t know why.
People would still talk in their communities and share recommendations.
Reviews (unpaid) would still be a thing.
Markets (real and virtual) where you can compare competing products and make a decision wouldn’t go away.
Reddit also grew more rapidly in recent years post-IPO for similar reasons. Reddit used to be more niche with fewer people even knowing it existed.
Knowing alternatives exist is half the battle. This fair comparison you hope people will make is just a hope without the ability to advertise. People have to know all possible alternatives exist in order for the market to be perfectly competitive.
The editing is not for everyone but I thoroughly enjoyed it. You come out of it not really knowing what it did to you, but something changed.
This is a fantastic recommendation, and Adam Curtis' documentaries are all on YouTube somehow.
You might enjoy reading about– or a book written by– Edward Bernays.
Advertising didn’t exist for most of history because mass media didn’t exist. Advertising is part and parcel of mass media.
That isn't all advertising. That is the modern algorithm-dependent systems that curate ads for individual viewers. In the good old days of print ads, ads targeted at say the readership of a particular magazine, we did not suffer from the downward spiral. There is no reason websites cannot have static ads. Many do. The issue is not advertising per se.
Indeed. Marketing is essentially capitalist propaganda. It promotes capitalism and consumerism in an implicit way, and doesn't even mention it.
It's vaguely of like the statement "X is the way to serve god best". I'm saying that god exists without actually making that statement; it's implicit. If statements of this style were ubiquitous, they work as propaganda in a way far stronger that just repeating "god exists".
Intellectually I know most people wouldn't mind living in a world without Slap Chop and those old Quizno's ads and Kylie Jenner solving racism with a Pepsi and Arnold riding a pennyfarthing inside of a Japanese energy drink bottle, but IMO that stuff really brings color to our often-monochrome human existence.
Consumer needs are met by the most efficient producers, products compete for consumers on the market. That makes a ton of sense. But ad spending inverts this relationship. Consumer needs are no longer an external condition for the market but become subject to producer intervention.
This creates a source of misalignment between incentives for producers and the public good.
I think outlawing ads would go a long way towards fixing capitalism.
While my opinion on ad tech has been negative for years, over the past couple of years I've come to realise how much this business model depends on outright crime to survive.
If you have YouTube ads on any device, you probably noticed (at least in my country) that a large fraction of ads are for either extremely low quality products (such as shitty mobile games, apps of dubious value that probably exist mostly to gobble up your data, or just shady IRL products), or outright scams of various kinds.
In one case I saw an obvious scam ad that impersonated a famous person in my country. I reported it to YouTube, and got back an email a while later that said that the ad did not break any of their rules and my report was dismissed.
Some weeks later I read a news article that reported that that exact scam had scammed some old people out of large amounts of money.
Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was genuinely surprised that my report had been dismissed. While I already thought YouTube is to blame in serving users scam ads, I had naively assumed that YouTube doesn't want to serve scam ads, it's just hard and expensive to filter them out systematically.
But no, they want to serve scam ads. Even when they get pointed out they refuse to remove them. A dollar paid by a scammer is just as good as a dollar paid by someone trying to advertise a real product. And they're not liable for the scam, so why would they care?
But surely that's too simplistic. Even a complete sociopath would understand that having your website/app overrun by scam ads will tarnish its reputation over time, or invite more aggressive regulation. So these long-term risks don't seem to be worth it. Unless, of course, scams are a very significant fraction of ad revenue.
So this is my hypothesis: scams ads provide a very significant fraction of advertising revenue on at least YouTube, and possibly most social media, perhaps to the point where the business model would not be viable without them.
* Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.
In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it!
* Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
* Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
* Banning billboards or other public advertising? Fine. Not new. Done all over the place for commonsensical reasons.
* Any article that talks about "blurry, “out-of-focus fascism”—that sense of discomfort that you feel but can't quite point out" is itself blurry and out-of focus, not to say absurd and hyperbolic. Calling a mild sense of psychological discomfort "fascism" is just embarrassing.
Some limits exist on advertising exist in most countries. Do they respect free speech?
> * Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
Absolutely zero thought is never given on policing boundaries on anything. That's not how the legal system operates. All laws are approximations at best and grey areas get decided by courts on a case-by-case basis.
> * Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
In my country, advertising alcohol is forbidden. Somehow I still manage to find interesting new beers to try year after year
This is interesting. Alcohol companies a well known to bypass this prohibition by all possible means (product placement, influencers,...) and yet I find real benefits in it. It would possibly be similar if advertising was forbidden for everything
Still, I believe we are better off like this than if those ads were allowed everywhere.
Any existing policy inevitably has a gray area, no matter how elaborate it is. That's okay if the author didn't cover corner cases in a short essay.
> You don't just magically know what to buy.
Knowing what you need is not magic. I don't remember much advertising lately that would tell me how a good can satisfy my existing needs. Mostly, they are trying to make me feel I need something I didn't need before
Knowing what you need is not magic, but knowing which products might satisfy it is not automatic. Advertising targeting, which people quite reasonably find intrusive, exists because advertisers desperately want to find people who may potentially want to buy their product.
Would not search + first party description solve that? It’s easy to create a page “you have problem A? Try our product B”.
How is that not advertising?
Knowing what you need is easy. Knowing what you might want is far harder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy#Perfect_soluti...
Corporations don't have rights. Corporations don't have the right to free speech.
Yes, I'm aware of the SCOTUS opinion on this issue--I'm saying SCOTUS is wrong on this.
And no, granting corporations personhood isn't a viable approximation. We're discussing a case in this thread where granting corporations a right is drastically different from granting individuals rights.
> Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
Your criticism is basically that OP didn't draft a full detailed legislation in a blog post. That's not how ideas get proposed on the internet and you know that.
> Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
I agree that people don't magically know what to buy, but ads make that problem worse, not better. Ads cannot inform, because they don't come from an unbiased source and even in the rare cases where they tell the truth, they're leaving out important facts intentionally. You're basically saying, "People don't know what the truth is, so we need to let liars lie to them." The solution to lack of knowledge is truth, not lies.
In the absence of advertising, independent third party reviews such as those provided by Consumer Reports would actually fill the need for consumer information.
Start by banning target advertisements - now ad platforms can’t use information about the user to decide which ad to show.
Next, ban forced advertisement - people cannot be forced to watch 10 seconds of an ad, or to have the ad be persistent on a page. All ads can be easily dismissed.
Then, force ad platforms to respect a user setting that says they don’t want to see ads. Just a new browser standard that communicates the user preference, or a toggle that can be changed in apps.
That alone should get rid of most problematic ads, but we’d still have sponsors and affiliate links. For those, we can start by increasing the requirements for disclaimers or identification. e.g. sponsored content has to be strictly separated from non-sponsored content. Get rid of “segways” and affiliate links close to the actual content.
If advertisers find loopholes or ways around these measures, we just close the holes with new regulation.
Free speech has a couple dozen exceptions like libel, incitement to violence, etc. And besides, it's not clear how it applies to corporations.
"Free" gifts for influencers typically need to be disclosed. Otherwise it's just payola.
Arguments like "policing the boundaries" can be applied to a lot of existing laws, so it's not particularly useful.
> In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
What information are you getting from a clip of a polar bear drinking a coke?
A-Are you Don Draper by any chance?
Seriously, though: you don't need marketing. What you need while searching for what product to buy is a technical specification of the product by which you can determine if the product suits your needs.
I keep thinking about this, and the only conclusion I can come to is that businesses would still need to be able to advertise their own products in places that they own.
For example, what if I want to buy a guitar?
I'm shopping online. First, I need to pick a company to purchase my guitar from. How do I choose? Any sort of aggregated comparison of places to purchase from can be considered advertising, so they are all banned (otherwise, astroturfing would be only form of advertising). Do search engines also count as advertising? Okay, so I've found a site. How do I know I'm getting a good deal? (although this is a whole different argument about us worried about getting a good deal because maybe we over-consume, it's still a consideration).
Now, on that site, is this company allowed to advertise different brands that they carry to me? By definition of advertising, no - the whole purpose of showing me products is to make me purchase, which is the definition. So then do we reach a true communist state where there is only one option to purchase? If so, can I still not see it because it's considered advertising? Okay, fine, I need to be able to see at least one guitar, we can concede that point.
Or maybe instead I go to the store to purchase a guitar. Firstly, how do I find the store? If they are not allowed to advertise, must I organically drive past their store? Are there rules on business signs that disallow specifying the type of store, because that could be construed as advertising products? Or is that limited to a certain brand - the goal is to allow all competition equally, so it just says "guitar store"? We've already agreed (probably) that this store can't 'advertise' itself elsewhere, so the only way I will know about it is through (illegal) word-of-mouth, which is still technically advertising. Or maybe it's only illegal for businesses to advertise? Or for people who are earning money from the act? How is that defined?
Okay, anyway, I've made it to the store. When I walk in, I'm met with the same dilemma in example one - the store isn't allowed to hang up products, because that incentivizes me to purchase. Maybe I need to just say "hey, show me a guitar so I can try it" and they must present me with a randomly selected guitar to avoid bias. We continue this until I find one that resonates with me. They can tell me the price of each, but not a sale price, as that falls under unfair advertising law to incentivize me to purchase a specific brand, so brands aren't allowed to run sales anymore. I have no idea if I'm getting what I want - sure, it sounds great and feels great and I enjoy it, but maybe I could have gotten that from a less expensive guitar, or maybe I didn't realize that I wanted a different size guitar.
By this point, economies of scale have collapsed because every purchase must be organic and therefore every national retailer has been dissolved - and most likely the largest manufacturers have discovered the best way to exploit this situation, so the largest now have natural monopolies and the rest have died off because they couldn't compete and were selling direct to consumer, not stocked in stores. Speaking of which, how do stores even work? How do grocery stores work? Every grocery store is built from the ground up on advertising. The same logic applies here. Two choices on a shelf must be in identical nondescript boxes with absolutely no calls to action or differentiators listed. Therefore, the smaller companies go out of business, or maybe the companies with the largest or smallest packages. In fact, just the size of an item can be used to intuit value, so now prices must be fixed to size, and sales & coupons are outlawed.
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All this to say, marketing in some form has existed since time immemorial. Finding value in choices is human nature.
The only way something like this could happen ("Advertising is illegal") would be a monumental wide-scale, best-effort, not-perfect set of judgement calls, which would require drastic overreach by a governing body - which would be exploited by finding weak links in the system and exchanging something they value to look the other way for a certain seller - which is exactly what got us to where we are.
One of the main reasons that we always arrive right back where we started is because the people with (less empathy, win-at-all-costs, better-than-thou, etc.) mentalities are willing and able to exploit the other group, the group that wants (peace, fairness, equity, teamwork), because the second set of values means enabling those around you, and the first set of values means taking advantage of that.
The only way I ever see healthy systems working is in relatively small groups of people where there can be shared accountability and swift action taken towards selfish behaviors, as defined as a community. Unless there is near-total buy-in, a system cannot thrive with the assurance of fairness, teamwork, equity.
I hate all the comments being so coy about definitions. Ublock seems to block ads pretty well. Maybe start there and not these crazy hypotheticals where anyone saying anything about a product is banned
I'm not against monetizing advertisement for the 1st use case either.
This is where your confusion stems from, I think. Any sort of independent third-party review site is totally not advertising as far as I'm concerned. The problem with sites like Yelp is that they accept money from companies and are susceptible to astroturfing. But truly independent reviewers like Consumer Reports, are pretty clear not advertising.
> Now, on that site, is this company allowed to advertise different brands that they carry to me? By definition of advertising, no - the whole purpose of showing me products is to make me purchase, which is the definition. So then do we reach a true communist state where there is only one option to purchase? If so, can I still not see it because it's considered advertising? Okay, fine, I need to be able to see at least one guitar, we can concede that point.
This seems like handwringing about the most extreme possible form of legislation possible which nobody is proposing. I am not sure what definition of "advertising" you're thinking of, but having a list of what products your store sells isn't advertising by any reasonable definition.
Why should advertisement be different?
That surely depends heavily on your definition of functioning democracy.
It's relatively easy and sensible to ban very specific forms of paying for influence. But a ban on publishing your opinion in someone else's publication is extremely broad and obviously in violation of free speech. Free speech isn't defined as standing on a corner yelling at people.
I also think it's counterproductive. All influence seeking (both commercial and political) would be forced to move from overt advertising to covert infiltration of our communication.
I want more transparency, not less.
It's worse than that in that it's just plainly wrong. I learn about useful products via advertising all the time -- so often, in fact, that I'm sort of bewildered that anybody could claim otherwise. We must be experiencing the world quite differently.
the irony is the author is using propaganda to spread populist ideas
> Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy.
We don’t need marketing, we need information. Objective information, that would be easier to come by in the absence of manipulative marketing.
Joolz strollers with ergonomic design, manoeuvrability, compactness, and storage space. compare and choose your favourite Joolz pushchair model.
Is this manipulation or information?
Personally, I can imagine a world without ads because I block them everywhere I can, and somehow I still manage to buy things, even if they might not be making me feel as cool as I should if I'd only play along.
Looks like manipulation. Information would be a sheet of parameters relevant to the product. The cheapest and most expensive strollers can be claimed to be "Compact" and "Ergonomic".
Who would maintain such information repositories and what would the incentive be to take that on? (As they no longer could be supported by ad revenue.)
Can you still advertise smoking in the US?
The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed?
What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?
What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?
I hate advertising and propaganda. But the hard part IMO is drawing the line. Where's the line?
The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising.
Giving out "free" samples? Presumably someone is being paid to do that, so advertising.
We can later quibble about edge cases and how to handle someone putting up a sign for their business. Many countries have regulations about visual noise, so that should be considered as well.
But it's pretty easy to distinguish advertising that seeks to manipulate, and putting a stop to that. Hell, we could start by surfacing the dark data broker market and banning it altogether. That alone should remove the most egregious cases of privacy abuse.
this is obviously not a clear line. No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Even worse: sometimes a genuine opinion becomes an incentivized one later on as someone's audience grows
the good news is there is a solution that doesn't require playing these cat & mouse games and top down authority deciding what is allowed speech: you want better ways to reach the people who want your product.
Ads are a bad solution to a genuine problem in society. They will persist as long as the problem exists. People who sell things need ways to find buyers. Solve the root problem of discernment rather than punishing everyone indiscriminately
No, you've got that backwards. People who sell things should have a way of announcing their product to the world. Buyers who are interested in that type of product should be the ones seeking out the companies, not the other way around.
The current approach of companies pushing their products to everyone is how we got to the mess we are in today. Companies will cheat, lie, and break every law in existence in order to make more money. Laws need to be made in order for companies to stop abusing people.
You know what worked well? Product catalogs. Companies buy ad space in specific print or digital media. Consumers can consult that media whenever they want to purchase a specific product. This is what ecommerce sites should be. Give the consumer the tools to search for specific product types, brands, specifications, etc.; get rid of fake reviews and only show honest reviews from verified purchases and vetted reviewers, and there you go. Consumers can discover products, and companies can advertise.
This, of course, is only wishful thinking, since companies would rather continue to lie, cheat, and steal, as that's how the big bucks are made.
I honestly find it disturbing that with all of humanity's progress and all the brilliant technology we've invented, all of our communication channels are corrupted by companies who want to make us buy stuff, and by propaganda from agencies that want to make us think or act a certain way. Like holy shit, people, is this really the best we can do? It's exhausting having to constantly fight against being manipulated or exploited.
The discussion got muddied because in this subthread, it morphed from "What if we made _all_ advertising illegal?" (original article's exact words) ... to gp's (imiric) less restrictive example of "acceptable" advertising such as "product catalogs".
So when the person crafting a reply is using the article author's absolutist position of no ads, the distinction doesn't matter.
If print media delivered to your door is considered "pull" because you have to open it, then i think so is instagram because you have to open the app.
If I open a product catalog, I do that to purposefully look at products.
I basically agree with the spirit of what you're saying but the line is not clear.
What if we took the approach of creating a clear legal distinction between advertising companies and non-advertising companies?
For example, if you want to be an advertising company, there are limits on what and how you can publish (such as having to use pull instead of push channels), and you don't get to also try to be a product or service company. If you want to be a non-advertising company, then you can't publish advertising.
This seems effective and also a much easier scenario to envision for those who find legal restrictions on speech to be unpalatable or inconceivable. It is actually not that outlandish at all; rather it's well within the bounds of what we already do. We already categorize companies by function and apply all kinds of different rules (restrictions on where and when and how they can operate, requirements for licensing and registration, environmental standards, liability standards, taxation rules) to companies based on what they produce or what purpose they serve, and we already accept that doing so has societal benefits.
There is also plenty of precedent for regulations that discourage cross-category operations precisely to simplify enforcement and manage risk. Healthcare providers are separated from payers; drugs cannot also be dietary supplements; legal businesses can't combine with non-law businesses; and so on. Even if cross-category operations aren't completely banned, the rules create friction and deterrence that still has important effects.
This is simply not true. You can buy or rent a server right now, run any kind of communication software on it that you want, and use that to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world, 100% ad-free. There are even pre-existing software stacks, like Mastodon, that make setting this up trivial.
I honestly find it disturbing that you don't appear to realise that you are asking for control over someone else's communication platform.
So your problem with advertising is really a problem with people, with human nature.
The truth is that whatever system you impose (with force no doubt!) would be optimized by the humans who exist in it.
People are not born with a knowledge of all of the products on the market, and the current price ranges for them.
Don't want an add supported service? Don't use it. Don't want ads on TV? Don't watch it. Don't want ads on others property? Let them control the look of your property.
Lots of people like ads because it's how they discover movies, restaurants, better financial help, better doctors, new hobbies, and a world they'd not have found otherwise.
Honestly, you couldn't have said that any better. I always think exactly about that. Where we are today, the technology that we have at our disposal, and yet this whole machinery working 24hs non-stop to put these consumption ideas on our heads, cheap propaganda and useless stuff to manipulate us like puppets. Really disgusting.
The most prosperous society ever known to man, a veritable wonderland of consumer choice and entrepreneurial opportunity that draws people from all over the world to study visit and move here. What a mess.
So we have some annoying advertising. Small price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supermarket_chains_in_...
https://www.kroger.com/search?query=salt&searchType=default_...
And just Food Lion alone has probably half a dozen to a dozen different salt varieties on the spice aisle.
I'm sure there are places in the US where choice is more limited, but that's the thing about a country of the size of the United States... you can find all kind of scenarios in different regions.
I've lived in a few overseas countries and consumer choice is absolutely limited. As a result you see a lot of people trying to import things they want that they can't otherwise get in their country.
If your hobby is cooking, good luck getting Arabic food ingredients in say Vietnam.
But in the US? If your own city doesn't have a store that carries them, you could easily order them online for next day delivery.
Ha. Tell that to the millions of victims from false advertising of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma.
That prosperous society and veritable wonderland is not looking so great these days. Perhaps the fact that the tools built for psychologically manipulating people into buying things can also be used to manipulate people into thinking and acting a certain way could be related to your current situation? Maybe those tools shouldn't have been available to everyone, including your political adversaries?
But hey, glad you're enjoying it over there.
People have known that smoking is bad for your health for around 400 years. You can't fix stupid, not even by making advertising illegal.
This is not really advertising, but it’s not really a problem either. People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Besides, there are only so many channels you can possibly control.
> nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion!
Sure. Maybe this is advertising that slips through. If all were down to is people advertising their friends’s products for no money then we would have eliminated 99.99% of the problem.
Further, if you have a highly influential channel, the cost of promoting a non genuine opinion about a friend’s product would almost certainly hurt your reputation, providing a strong disincentive to do such a thing.
Similar thing happened with Amazon recently. They copied bestsellers and promoted their own products in their store leading to death of other companies. Now you are just making this loop in steroids. All the small companies would be forced to be sold to companies with eyeballs like Meta and Google.
But this is not the vast majority of 'advertising' or where advertising causes so much harm. A single individual has much less power to manipulate a single other individual, let alone thousands of other individuals. It takes millions of dollars to hire people with specialized marketing skills to do that.
Isn’t it? You receive money when people buy your product because of your advertising.
The line is absolutely not clear.
Is ABC allowed to run commercials for its own shows?
ABC is owned by Disney. Is ABC allowed to run commercials for Disney shows? Is it allowed to run commericals for Disney toys?
Can ABC run commercials for Bounty paper towels, in exchange for Bounty putting ads for ABC shows on its paper towel packaging?
Literally no money is being exchanged so far.
I'm familiar with a lot of gray areas that courts regularly have to decide on. But trying to distinguish advertising from free speech sounds like the most difficult free speech question I've ever come across. People are allowed to express positive opinions about products, and even try to convince their friends, that's free speech. Trying to come up with a global definition of advertising that doesn't veer into censorship... I can't even imagine. Are you suddenly prevented from blogging about a water bottle you like, because you received a coupon for a future water bottle? Because if you use that coupon, it's effectively money exchanged. What if your blog says you wouldn't have bothered writing about the bottle, but you were so impressed with the coupon on top of everything else it got you to write?
You can argue over any of these examples, but that's the point: you're arguing, because the line isn't clear.
> Can ABC run commercials for Bounty paper towels, in exchange for Bounty putting ads for ABC shows on its paper towel packaging?
I was with you until this one
Under both IRS and GAAP rules, that's equivalent to money changing hands. So in a hypothetical "no money for advertising" world, that would be over the line.
A network of TV stations could cross-promote across all stations. Yes, that would be unfair, but no more unfair than the current situation where whoever has more money can have their ads seen everywhere. Fairness between companies isn't the goal, it's less manipulation and noise for the rest of us.
There's an example of a TV station that already has to follow these rules: the BBC.
That's not what would happen.
You'd just end up with diverse companies consolidating into single companies and advertising just as much as before, but for their own products in their own media properties.
Coca-Cola will merge with a movie studio and a television network and a billboard company to put its product placement and ads everywhere in properties it just simply owns. Probably merging with Proctor-Gamble or Unilever while it's at it.
BetterHelp will merge with a bunch of supplements companies and purchase a bunch of top podcast studios, so top podcasts will continue to advertise the same exact things as before.
And so on.
It's wishful thinking to suppose that companies wouldn't find ways around this. Advertising is that powerful and important that it'll be worth it to them.
One other example I was thinking was product placement. Are these characters eating pizza? Or is it Pizza Hut®™ pizza?
Well, not if they pay employees to do it. Except that shows aren't products, they're services, so they'd be exempt from this proposal.
What does that mean? What's a service in this definition? Surely not in the normal definition of a "service", as in health care or tech? Like is a movie a service too?
Or do you just mean something you get for free because it's a show on their own channel? What if you had to pay for shows ala carte?
A show isn't made of matter. If you pay for it, you can't take possession of it or resell it later. If you, the buyer, aren't available at the time that it is provided, you get nothing of value out of the deal. These are attributes of services like surgery or internet connectivity, not products like antibiotics and computers. ("Health care" and "tech" are too vague to be useful.)
Getting things for free is not, as you imply, a usual attribute of services.
So that would exclude:
- listing your house, or car in the classifieds
- buying a sign for your business (ad discussed in other posts)
- buying a garage sale sign
- buying a for sale sign, or flyers for your house for sale
- paying a realtor to sell your house
- paying a reporter or professional reviewer to write a review. Even if they are paid by a newspaper/magazine/consumer report site, money exchanged hands for something that promotes a product.
- distributing a catalog
- paying a cloud provider or VPS provider or website hosting service to host a website that promotes your product
Also, what exactly constitutes a "product"? Does a service count? If not, that is a pretty big loophole. What about a job position? Or someone looking for employment?
And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists. Word of mouth isn't very effective if you don't have any customers to begin with. I would expect removing all advertising to have a chilling effect on innovation and new businesses.
To be clear, I think the current advertising environment is terrible, and unhealthy, and needs to be fixed. But I think that removing all advertisement would have some negative ramifications, especially if the definition of an ad is too simplistic.
Since we're coming up with hypothetical laws and loopholes, here is a simple addendum to my original argument:
- Only applies for companies, and only to those with more than $100,000 ARR.
There. That avoids penalizing most of the personal advertising scenarios you mentioned. Since laws are never a couple of sentences long, I'm sure with more thought we'd be able to find a good balance that prevents abuse, but not legitimate use cases for informing people about a product or service.
Again, the goal is not to get into philosophical discussions about what constitutes advertising, and banning commercial speech, or whatever constitutional right exists. The goal is to prevent companies from abusing people's personal data, profiling them, selling their profiles on dark markets, allowing mass psychological manipulation that is threating our democratic processes, and in general, from corrupting every communication channel in existence. Surely there are ways of accomplishing this without endless discussions about semantics and free speech.
But, as I've said in other threads, this is all wishful thinking. There is zero chance that the people in power who achieved it by these means will suddenly decide to regulate themselves and kill their golden goose. Nothing short of an actual revolution will bring this system down.
> And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists.
Agreed. In the olden days before digital ads, product catalogs worked well. Companies would buy ad space in specific print media, and consumers interested in buying a product would consult the catalog for the type of product they're looking for. Making ads pull rather than push solves this awareness problem proponents of advertising deem so important. The reason they prefer the push approach is because it's many times more profitable for all involved parties. The only victims in this system are the people outside of it. The current system is making a consumer of everyone every time they interact with any content, when the reality is that people are only consumers when they're actively looking to buy something. Most of the time we just want to consume the content we're interested in, without being sold anything. It's the wrong approach, with harmful results, and the only reason we stuck with it is because it's making someone else very rich. It's absolute insanity.
Listing a house for sale on an agent’s website: not advertising.
Promoting that listing or the agent on the home page of a local news site: advertising
etc…
Some cases will be harder, all are decidable. We are talking about law not code, so there’s no need for a perfect algorithm, the legal system is designed precisely to deal with these sorts of question.
According to the definition given, if the intent is to "promote a product", and money changed hands it is.
It also meets websters definition of advertising:
> the action of calling something to the attention of the public especially by paid announcements
Zero difference from hiring a TV channel to promote your product, on their channel, to sell it.
Which is why trying to define advertising in a way that bans it is not simple at all.
GP says "Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising."
OK. Now the realtor adds a blog. They start publishing news about the real estate business. With listings mixed in. Congrats, you've got a newspaper with ads for homes. Are you ready to say the realtor can't publish news? Isn't that censorship?
Also, home listings aren't "factual". They're promotional. They focus on pros and omit cons. They have photos that hide the ugly parts. They're ads for homes, period.
There isn't a difference in terms of the fact that it's advertising a sale. Nor is it relevant if you're doing so personally, as a sole proprietor, as a partnership, as an S corp or as a C corp. Advertising something for sale is advertising something for sale. Ads are ads.
Also, on the realtor's site they're listing hundreds of homes. Not any different from your local car dealership advertising their hundreds of vehicles. They're both corporations listing ads.
Advertising is advertising.
Let's say I have a journal. It costs money to subscribe. It covers a topic that many college students also study.
Can I give the school a free copy? Can I give the teachers one? Can I give the students one? Is this advertising? When does the amount of "value" become offensive?
> surfacing the dark data broker market and banning it altogether.
This is why this has become a modern problem. I can live with erring on the side of free speech when it comes to advertising, but there is no side to err on when it comes to analytics and targeting.
It's fine if everyone here wants to fantasize about some alternative system, but "we make advertising illegal" is not something that can happen in our system of governance.
I mean, no, legislatures (both Congress and the states) successfully limit commercial speech all the time, which is, for instance, why no one in Gen X has seen or heard a TV or radio ad for cigarettes in the US when they were old enough to purchase them.
> but "we make advertising illegal" is not something that can happen in our system of governance.
Broadly banning "advertising" (under almost any plausible definition that would be reasonably accord with common use) would probably fall afoul off the 1st Amendment as it is today, but our Constitutional system of government includes provision for changing any feature of the Constitution (nominally, except the equal representation of states in the Senate, but that restriction neither protects itself from being amended out, nor protects all the functions of the Senate from being amended out and the equal representation being at zero seats per state, so it is more of a symbolical than substantive restriction.)
Re: "The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising."
But also, it seems pretty clear that political stories specifically generate massive cash flow for media, through clicks and "online engagement", the spectacle of debates, video of gaffes, and so on. I'd assume that is why the political "season" lasts longer and longer? The politicians certainly take advantage of this and use it to their ends. The media seem not to care as long as they continue to get "paid", in their way, and have access.
This is a disgusting arrangement, IMO.
I am sure that's the case _today_ , with all the crazy politics going on, but if you ask me average over 2 years? I am not sure at all.
And while I'm inclined to believe not everyone should have free speech, I'm also aware that denying it is authoritarian.
The New York Times Company can say anything they want about anything, and especially political candidates.
It is not. It never is. But that is not a big problem.
Around the boundary cases there will be injustice and strife. But only around the boundary cases.
We deal with this all the time in our societies. Some societies are better at it than others
"The perfect is an enemy of the good"
Studio Ghibli made ~$220m on Spirited Away. What if they made $2.2T, is the quality going to go up, or down? And, would there be less ads, if no one made even $2.2 on them?
What's the connection between adverts and the amount of money Ghibli made on their best-loved movie?
Hmm, maybe none, maybe you're using Ghibli as a metaphor for products that make money through adverts. And maybe the implied answer to the next question is that their next movie, The Cat Returns, would have been higher quality if they had made even more money on Spirited Away. So what you could be saying is that crippling the ad industry would lead to lower quality products, without even much reducing the number of (less effective) adverts that get made.
That's one way to read what you said, but I feel like I got it wrong.
People getting paid to do things do worse than otherwise[1]. They do better when not paid. The quality of work often gets worse when they get more. It's well established. As counterintuitive as sometimes it seem to be.
What I'm essentially saying is, if you think people are right now getting paid to do something bad to the society(e.g. ads), you might want to keep them hooked and tied to the money and not to something else, like advertising for its own sake.
Fear the work of unpaid ad execs! They won't stop making adverts, it's what they live for, money or no money! The adverts will continue to be made, but now they will be made for love, and they will be extremely high quality! And if you think ordinary adverts are bad, wait until you see what adverts are like when they come from the heart!
Except that it is, and it's why social media is so important for marketeers; the best kind of advertising is word-to-mouth, so generating discourse about products is big business.
Anyway, without strict legislation and tight controls on social media / chat / RL, how would you know whether they would be getting paid or not?
It's a legal and / or philosophical conundrum, not to mention even more of a legal whack-a-mole than it already is.
So if I paint my store front's sign myself, I'm good, but if I pay a signwriter to paint it, it's illegal?
I guess I better become "friends" with a signwriter, so that they don't mind making a sign or two for me "for free". And so that I don't mind giving them a widget or two from my store sometime in the future.
Or is it money exchange with sign manufacturer? In this case are outdoor signs OK if owner personally made them?
I suppose the sign itself must be paid for... but many eateries are using the same signs for menus, so if owner re-purposed one of the menu signs, is there money involved? Or does owner have to dig in garbage bins to find the blackboard for free? What about writing messages straight on the wall? What about printing signs on the printer your own and taping them to the wall?
Now, don't get me wrong, I think it would be an overall improvement if those professionally-made outdoor signs get replaced by artisanal handwritten (or at least handmade) ones, but I don't think that this is what the original idea was about.
[0] https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/text-written-on-cha...
For that matter, would it be prohibited for employees to promote any product in any way?
Trying to ban all advertising of course wouldn’t get anywhere (especially under the current SCOTUS), and the article’s author clearly hasn’t really thought through the implications. But there is a legal door that is ajar, in the Central Hudson test, and could potentially be widened by arguing that some classes of today’s advertising are against the public interest; the First Amendment is already not blanket covering all commercial speech.
Meanwhile, even the original Central Hudson test --- if commercial speech concerns lawful activity and isn't misleading, the government (1) needs a substantial interest and (2) must narrowly tailor the restriction --- was inhospitable to the sentiment in this blog post. But Central Hudson has as I understand it gotten more restrictive, not less; for instance, Sorrell, which was a bipartisan decision, applies heightened scrutiny to regulations under Central Hudson.
You can keep cigarette ads out of Highlights for Kids. But you're not going to be able to keep Nike from buying up ad inventory, and you'll certainly not be able to regulate political and cause advertising (and "propaganda").
The purpose of "free speech" is to allow the spread of ideas.
The purpose of advertising is to spread an idea.
They are different things.
Yes, the purpose of "free speech" is to allow the spread of ideas. The purpose of any particular piece of speech (a book, a pamphlet, a poster, a sign, a rally, a concert, anything) is to spread an idea. The idea in that particular piece of speech.
Do you want to preserve free speech but ban speech that tries to spread an idea? Your comment would be banned because you're trying to spread that idea.
Commercial speech is a legal term for speech that promotes commerce [1].
Let's consider toomim's three examples: "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together," giving out free samples, and putting a sign up on your business that says the business name.
The first case seems like it would straightforwardly be illegal under your proposal if the waiter is an employee (or contractor) who gets paid by the restaurant, because the restaurant is exchanging money with the waiter in order to promote the rosé, which is a product. It would only be legal if the waiter were an unpaid volunteer or owned the restaurant.
The second case seems like it would straightforwardly be illegal under your proposal if the business had to buy the free samples from somewhere, knowing that it would give some of them out as free samples, because then it's exchanging money with its supplier in order to promote its products (in some cases the same product, but in other cases the bananas and soft drinks next to the cash registers, which people are likely to buy if you can get them into the store). Also, if one of the business's employees (or a contractor) gave out the free samples, that would be exchanging money with the employee to promote a product. You'd only be in the clear if you're a sole proprietor or partnership who bought the products without intending to give them away, changed your mind later, and then gave them away yourself rather than paying an employee to do so.
Putting up a sign on the business that says the business name is clearly promoting products, if the business sells products. Obviously the business can't pay a sign shop. If the business owner makes the sign herself, that might be legal, but not if she buys materials to make the sign from. She'd have to make the sign from materials unintentionally left over from legitimate non-advertising purchases, or which she obtained by non-purchase means, such as fishing them out of the garbage. However, she'd be in the clear if her business only sells services, not products.
A large blanket loophole in the law as you proposed it is that it completely exempts barter. So you can still buy a promotional sign from the sign shop if you pay the sign shop with something other than money, such as microwave ovens. The sign shop can then freely sell the microwave ovens for money.
In this form, it seems like your proposal would put at risk basically any purchase of goods by a product-selling business, except for barter, because there is a risk that those goods would be used for premeditated product promotion. Probably in practice businesses would keep using cash, which would give local authorities free rein to shut down any business they didn't like, while overlooking the criminal product-promotion conspiracies of their friends.
So, do you want to propose some legal language that is somewhat more narrowly tailored? Because a discussion entirely based on "I know it when I see it" vibes is completely worthless; everyone's vibes are different.
The first case is legal because waiter gets paid by the restaurant to serve meals, not to promote the specific brand of rose wine. Only illegal if the waiter has another, secret contract with the wine manufacturer to “recommend” specific wine.
The other two cases are legal because the money exchanged in order to receive goods. The fact the goods are then used to promote something is irrelevant.
Similarly, a man purchasing physical stuff is giving money in exchange for the goods as opposed to advertisement services. Classic contract of sale of physical goods, nothing even slightly ambiguous.
It’s the same with ordering a sign. “Exchanging money in order to promote a product” doesn’t happen because manufacturing the sign is not a promotion. To promote something using a sign, you would need to post the sign in a publicly visible place. Manufacturing a sign and giving it to your client in private doesn’t promote the product shown on the sign.
That said, after thinking about it for a few more minutes, I can think of one simple addendum to my initial criteria. I wrote about it here[1], so I won't repeat myself.
It's asinine that this discussion is taken to extreme ends. We don't need to ban all forms of advertising and get into endless discussions about semantics and free speech in order to stop the abuse of the current system. There is surely a middle ground that does it in a sensible way. The only reason we don't fix this is because the powers that be have no incentives to do so, and the general population is conditioned and literally brainwashed to not care about it.
If you can't figure out how to express what you want in such a way that it doesn't immediately collapse upon the most casual attempt at critical thought, the problem probably isn't that the population is brainwashed. It's probably that what you want is to eat your cake and still have it, a logical contradiction that could never exist in any possible world.
You seem to think that the law is something that can be delegated to the lawyers. But in fact the law balances conflicting interests. If you don't participate in defining it, your interests won't be taken into account. A law written by lawyers without outside input will only serve the lawyers' interests, not yours.
If you can't see how the current system is harming not just individuals, but the stability of governments and our democratic processes, and the role of the advertising industry in all of this, then nothing I nor anyone else says can convince you otherwise.
You seem more interested in scrutinizing hastily put together arguments by laypeople on an internet forum, than acknowledging the issues put forth, and the fact that fixing this deeply rooted problem will require multi-faceted solutions over a very long period of time.
And for that reason, I'm out.
This:
> It's not the role of citizens to come up with regulation that protects them. It's not their role to protest or even acknowledge that they are being abused. It's the role of governments and law makers to ensure the safety of their citizens.
is not a description of the relationship between citizens and a democracy. It's a description of the relationship between subjects and a monarch or dictator—a relationship which invariably results in serious abuses of those subjects.
If you don't have a coherent idea of what you want, nobody can give it to you.
For example, it violates no rule to include valid Emergency Broadcast System/Emergency Alert System tones (the electronic, machine-interpretable "chirps") in a movie or TV show, or to publish that via streaming, DVD etc. But no one does this, because broadcasting spurious tones (and triggering spurious automated broadcast interruptions) carries serious first-instance fines to which FCC licensees (ie distributors via broadcast) agree as a condition of licensure. They know they aren't allowed to do this and, very occasional and expensive mishaps excepted, they won't take the risk. (1) So program material that wants to include those tones has to make sure they're excluded from the TV edit, or decide whether the verisimilitude is worth the limit on audience access.
While the specifics of course vary among cases, the basic theory of broadcast (ie distribution) as distinct from and less protected than speech, with the consequential distinction drawn specifically along the scale at which speech is distributed, seems clear.
(1) Some may note instances such as one of the Purge films (iirc) that seem to contradict this claim. Compare the tones in those examples with the ones in test samples or generated by a compliant encoder [1] for the "Specific Area Message Encoding" protocol. Even without a decoder, the FSK frequencies and timings have to be resilient to low-bandwidth channels designed to carry human voice, so it's all well within audible ranges and you can hear the difference between real tones and what a movie or show can safely use. Typically either the pitch is dropped below compliant ranges, or the encoding is intentionally corrupted, or both. But almost always, the problem is just sidestepped entirely, since it's the attention tone that everyone really notices anyway.
[1] https://cryptodude3.github.io/same/ is no more certified than mine but has, unlike my own implementation, been tested against a real EAS ENDEC. At some point I want to test mine against that one and find out how badly I screwed up reading the spec ten years ago...
Uh, what? You say there's no rule and then in the next sentence you talk about a rule.
The example I like to refer to is my phone's PagerDuty ringtone, which includes a set of SAME headers (syntactically valid but encoding no meaningful alert, not that it matters) followed by the attention tone.
Nothing I personally do with that ringtone can reasonably qualify as a violation of 47 CFR 11, because I don't have a broadcast license and thus am not bound by the provisions of one, to include those related to EAS.
It would be a crime for me to broadcast that ringtone directly - not because of the nature of the transmission, but because operating an unlicensed transmitter in licensed bands is an offense. Depending on the specifics of my putative pirate-radio actions under this scenario, in theory a case might be made under 47 CFR 11.45.1 ("No person may transmit or cause to transmit...") for a fine along with the prison sentence, but I doubt anyone would see much cause to bother.
But, if I were to go to a radio station for a live interview in the course of which my PagerDuty ringtone went off and the edit delay failed, causing the ringtone to go out over the air - in that case the radio station would be considered to have violated the EAS rule.
edit: OK, I nerd-sniped myself and did look it up again; it's 47 CFR 11.45 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/section-11.45 which has been amended since I last reviewed it during the Obama administration to forbid transmission of the Attention Signal (the equal-amplitude 853/960Hz mix that raises the hair on your neck) as well as the encoded headers that will trigger automated EAS equipment. It's not terribly well written in my view, and I'm much more familiar with the technical than the legal aspects, but there's no precedent at least of which I'm aware for anyone not actually an "EAS Participant" as defined in 47 CFR 11.2 to see any kind of enforcement action over an EAS violation.
If a company sends you a free sample in exchange for writing a review, and you get to keep it regardless of your conclusion, is that a payment? If so, that shuts down a way for consumers to get reviews of products before purchasing, but if not, the company might find various non-payment ways to influence what the reviewer writes.
The biggest example that comes to mind is gambling. Japan says it's not gambling if the pachinko place gives you balls and then you have to walk next door to a "different" company to cash out the balls. I say it sounds like their laws are captured by the pachinko industry.
Video game loot boxes are technically legal but most of us don't want children gambling. Even if the game company doesn't pay you for weapon skins, there's such a big secondary market that it constitutes gambling anyway. Just like the pachinko machines.
It wasn't just the pachinko industry that tied the hands of Japanese government. It was the people too. It's a lot harder to ban something and keep it banned when everybody wants it. Thankfully, not many people want ads, but pachinko was popular enough that it makes sense to continue to let people do it. You're right about still getting a benefit. Even after carving out exceptions, banning gambling broadly otherwise is effective enough to solve a lot of the problems that unregulated gambling can cause.
I do think video game loot boxes are something that needs regulation. Not just because it is gambling, but because the games can be unfair and even adversarial. Casinos exploit and encourage adult gambling addicts but at least those games are required to be "fair" (no outright cheating) and they have to be honest about how unfair the odds against you are. A supposedly impartial third party goes around making sure casinos are following the rules. Video games don't have any of that and they're targeting children on top of it.
Is buying packages of random baseball/pokemon/etc cards gambling then?
Being unable to tell when something is "advertising" forces everyone to think twice before hawking their wares, which is exactly what we want if we intend to kill ads. The chilling effect is precisely the intention.
It’s the engineer’s curse to believe that airtight laws are automatically better, or that justice springs from mechanistic certainty. The world is fundamentally messy, and the sooner we accept its arbitrariness, the sooner we can get to an advertising-free world.
That's why we have judges and lawyers, so that the outcome can be decided as a communal process instead of just one person deciding what is punishable - even if the person is the developer building the automated justice dispenser and they'll be not around when the decision is taken, it would still be made by the whims of a single enforcer.
"The ambiguity of these questions is a feature rather than a bug. Being unable to tell when something is "advertising" forces everyone to think twice..."
Courts performing the job of interpretation is indeed not the same as selective enforcement, but this comment expressly advocates for deliberate ambiguity. Not unavoidable ambiguity.
They obviously did not know they are asking for selective enforcement by that name, or why that is a bad thing, a far worse thing than the advertizing or whatever other bad behavior they imagine "forces everyone to think twice" curtails, but that is what ambiguity in a law gets you.
Let alone a whole other dimension to this, that it doesn't even curtail what they think.
They think they are attacking advertizers, but advertizers are fine under selective enforcement. Really they are only attacking themselves and all other little guy individuals. Google and Amazon and all other advertizers have the money and the connections at city hall to get their own behavior selectively allowed. It's only you and me and themselves who will ever have to "think twice".
And it goes on down from every slightly bigger fish vs every slightly smaller. The local used car dealer uglifying your neighborhood has more friends on the police force and at the mayors office than you do, so they get to do whatever, and you get to think twice.
I knew. I said it anyway. I maintain that selective enforcement establishes a chilling effect.
It is a "cure" that is both ineffective and worse than the disease.
It's putting knives on the outside of cars to have a chilling effect on jaywalking.
Outright banning, yes maybe. But many countries or local governments severely regulate advertising in one form or another, and no one is crying foul either.
This is a worse is better[1] situation. Specifically, I'm arguing against the MIT approach to lawmaking.
The MIT approach:
> The design must be consistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.
Thinking about laws like software terminates thought.
- Advertising and marketing are when an entity pays some other entity to transmit content
- Public relations is when an entity, without paying, causes another entity to transmit content
- Public affairs is when an entity causes a governmental entity to consume specific content at minimum, up to possibly influencing decisions. It should go without saying that this is without paying as well, otherwise it's corruption/bribery
So all usage of the internet would apply?
...an entity A pays some other entity B to transmit some specific content to a third party to induce the third party to take action that benefits the paying entity A.
If I enter your restaurant, car dealership, etc. then you can pitch & try to up-sell your goods and services to me.
If I drive down a motorway or use your website, third-parties can't advertise their goods and services at me from spots you've sold them. (But you can tell me it will be faster to exit onto your toll road or that I should buy or upgrade my membership plan on the site.)
And what's solicited or 'relevant' doesn't need to be rigidly defined in statutes (assuming common law) - the ASA or OfCom whoever it would be (UK examples) slaps fines on the rulebreakers and if they think they've interpreted the law correctly in good faith then it goes to court and we find out (and the growing body of case law helps future would-be-advertisers interpret it).
The existing advertisement disclosure rules for social media for example don't allow the loophole you propose: a 'sponsored' segment shilling a product in a YouTube video isn't considered different from directly selling video time to the third-party in which to run their own ad reel.
Rule of thumb, all aggressive unwanted information.
Clear? For sure not, like you said. But I am considering (rather dreaming) moving to La Palma, a vulcano island that banned all light advertisement (they did so, because of the observatories on top, but they are cool).
Still, a city without aggressive lights would be nice. Some lights are probably unavaidable in big cities, but light that is purposeful distracting, should be just banned.
And online is kind of a different beast, as we voluntarily go to the sites offering us information (but thank god and gorhill for adblockers)
Many laws do draw lines in areas that are equally difficult. Its a problem, but far from a fatal one.
Many countries have laws against corruption that are structured like that.
(Schrösédinger, if you will.)
You are starting from technicalities before you even took the moment to actually think of goal is worth it.
If it is worth it and we would indeed be better off - plan how to go there, it may not be easy, but it will be possible this way or another. If it is not worth it after all - just say it, no technicalities needed, redirect time and effort elsewhere.
If you expect a this for that that benefits the giver. Like say a pharma offering free airfare and lodging to a medical conference if you talk up their product to patients.
There will be corner cases, obscure circumstances, unforeseen loopholes, etc., but this would be a good start.
But it also benefits large businesses that already spent millions advertising and now have a much deeper moat.
It kind of reminds me of college sports before NIL deals. Back then, you couldn't pay college recruits. You'd think this levels the playing field, right?
In fact, we saw the opposite effect. You see schools spending millions to add waterslides to their locker rooms, or promising "exposure" that smaller schools can't offer. You essentially had to spend twice as much on stuff that indirectly benefited the players.
I'd expect similar things to happen among businesses. Think "crazy stunt in Times Square so that an actual news site will write about it."
Though, this piece made me groan with the buzzwords "a micro-awakening of the self." Great way to make me cringe if I send it to someone.
For the waiter, this is probably true.
It's like correcting someone on the pronunciation of French-English forte. It just gets you uninvited next time.
Were they paid by a vintner to say that?
>What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?
To and by whom? From Nvidia to a GPU reviewer: Yes; from a chocolate shop to a patron: No.
>What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?
No. Do you have any hard questions?
When you are dining, and are suggested food pairings -- I'm there to eat, so suggesting something food related from the same establishment, that may enhance my meal experience, makes sense and generally does not feel unduly interruptive. In a way, I consent to being offered additional interesting and available food items at that time and place. I would not find it acceptable if the waiter brought out a catalog and tried to sell me shoes or insurance.
In a similar way, I don't mind (and often even enjoy or appreciate) movie trailers at the beginning of movies. I'm there to watch a movie, and in a fairly non-interruptive way (before the start of the movie) I am presented with some other movies coming out soon. Nice. I consent to seeing them at the start of a movie, and they are relevant to the subject matter. I would certainly be irritated if they were hoisted upon me in the middle of the movie, or if they were about new cars coming out soon.
I have also at times been actively searching for something I need or want to purchase, but am unsure what exactly I am looking for or what are the best options. At that time I would certainly be more open and interested in seeing advertisements regarding the types of items I am interested in. I would "consent" to seeing interest based advertisements.
Summary: I do not enjoy being interrupted with advertisements completely unrelated to whatever activity I am taking part in. I only want to see them when it is related to what I am doing, AND when I consent to seeing them.
IMO it should be illegal due to using a system for safety announcements for non-safety profit related reasons.
So it is for advertising. You don't need to draw a clear line for every case before you can make a law.
I like how it turned out with email advertising, actually: spam is defined to be whatever people put into their spam folder.
The internet is supposed to be an information retrieval tool. Advertising’s whole goal is to stand between you and the information you actually want. And it does so by trying to anticipate instead of the thing you want, the thing you are most willing to buy next, whether that’s actual products with money or propaganda. Whereas an ad in a magazine about computers offers me relevant ads for products about computers. And if you read old ad copy a lot of it is a serious effort to try and convince you to buy their product. From some kind of argument for it. Instead of simply using statistics and data to predict what you will buy next. So this required the product to actually deliver something to justify the effort to advertise it.
Why? I don't see the difference between a webpage and the magazine here, except that I guess you're assuming the webpage must be showing an unrelated ad.
Are you a publisher (ie responsible for every single thing that appears on your platform)? You can show advertising. Otherwise no.
I know this isn’t in the spirit of the article, but I like the idea of a ad-spaces and ad-free spaces.
So lets do this: ban all ads in print, video, and in-public. Make the fine so high that you’re going to have to declare bankruptcy and close up shop. Or just straight up revoke corporate charters. There’s your line. I’m happy to start here and negotiate backwards. But this needs to be in effect while we work it out. Advertising is killing us. I don’t need or want myself or my family constantly assaulted by ads.
Finally, to be frank I find advertisements a sibling of propaganda. I don’t want either.
There are dangerous consequences to handing the government the authority to ban public communication (even about mouthwash brands) without very careful scrutiny.
Imagine if you couldn't advertise energy alternatives because oil and gas came first and, with advertising banned, we can't even talk about the relative merits of installing solar vs. buying coal-made grid electricity. The status quo will maintain until the planet cooks.
I recommend looking up the videos they made in the 1950s about how to use modern appliances, telephones, etc. and then noting that those videos were mostly paid for by the companies that manufactured those goods because they had a vested interest in people knowing how to use the tools so they would buy the tool.
> What we wouldn't be able is to be paid by someone to have a specific public discourse.
Widecast public communications always cost money. Always. Somebody is putting money forward to put a message on that billboard, or on that radio, or on that website. If we ban advertising but we aren't banning billboards, radio, and websites, we are tying off one category of communicator. Cynically, I would expect the result to not be an end to commercial advertising, but for more commercial advertising disguised as other things. I don't know that we would be able to disambiguate the two ideas, not in a world where, for example, public television programs are supported by the Sears Roebuck Corporation.
Yes youtube costs money to run. Selling your private data and attention shouldn't be an option. So who should pay the bill? If you're the customer, that would be You, or no one if you consider that empty channel not to be worth it.
That's a great question, but let's not lose sight of the fact that failing to legislate on this is 0% reliable. If we even are able to identify and ban 25% of advertising, that level of reliability is a massive improvement over doing nothing. Don't fall for the perfect solution fallacy.
The reality is that some really basic, careful definitions of advertising would identify a huge percentage of advertising, without catching any cases that aren't advertising.
As a starting point, if a corporation pays a person or corporation to display their corporation's name, product, or logo on a physical property, broadcast, or publication when they aren't directly selling your product, that's advertising. Maybe you can think of some cases where that catches some stuff it shouldn't, and I'm open to revising it.
> What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?
> What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?
I think this sort of handwringing is pretty silly. I don't care about either of those--I do care about "free samples" in the sense of auto-renewing free trials, but that's because the intent is to trick people into forgetting to cancel, not because it's advertising.
Draw the line very conservatively, making a very clear definition of advertising that we can agree on illegal, and go from there as we see the effects (i.e. what loopholes people start to use). Regulation is an iterative process--start small and build.
There would be no commercial ads online if google received no kickbacks to show ads. There would be no influencers, either. I'd be okay with non-profits and government agencies advertising benevolent things to us, like vaccinations.
The only hard part is to develop systems to actually ensure nobody is receiving compensation if they are showing a product.
I'd also be fine to make exceptions for internal advertising, e.g. you're already on the Google website and Google is advertising their own products/services to you.
Frankly, we should advertise more education - then maybe we wouldn't have some of our current issues.
You want no ads? Cool, let's familiarize yourself with North Korea.
People might want to rather opt for ethical ad standards and regulations, something fundamental like... GDPR.
Whatever happened to product catalogs? Remember those? I'm interested in purchasing a new computer, so I buy the latest edition of Computer Shoppers Monthly. Companies buy ad space there, and I read them when I'm interested. The entire ecommerce industry could work like that. I go on Amazon, and I search for what I want to buy. I don't need algorithms to show me what I might like the most. Just allow me to search by product type, brand, and specifications, and I'm capable of making a decision. It would really help me if paid and promoted reviews weren't a thing, and I could only see honest reviews by people who actually purchased the product. This is a feature that ecommerce sites can offer, but have no incentive to.
The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages.
While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we cannot withdraw from even with ad and script blockers, because so much of society is built upon the advertising sector that it’s impossible to fully escape them. People like the OP and us are mocked for moves to block billboards in space as being “alarmist” or out of touch, yet driving along any highway in the USA will bombard you with ads on billboards, on busses, on rideshares, on overly-large signs with glowing placards, in radio and television, on streaming providers who raise our rates on what used to be ad-free packages.
Advertising is cancer, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. Let’s get rid of it.
It’s constant and ever-increasing. I stopped watching a 30 minute video recently after the 5th ad break just over 10 minutes in.
On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.
It feels like standover tactics, showing the worst of the worst unless you pay up.
I should also at least admit that recently,Like the last 12 months, those greasy-type ads are less common, having been replaced with more television-style ads, although they last longer. Still an improvement overall though.
Isn't it hypocritical to want YouTube to offer you its content for free? If the content is valuable to you, you should be willing to pay for it. If not, just stop watching YouTube.
It's obvious that if advertising was made illegal, we would need to pay for all those services that we want to use. YouTube premium is the best example of how that would actually work.
But I do, by supporting those creators through Patreon. Paying for YouTube Premium sounds like a bad deal since I'm not directly supporting the creators for which I go to YouTube in the first place.
I get that YouTube doesn’t give enough of a percentage of profits to the creator, but the alternative should be a different video hosting platform that does give more profits to creators. Not patreon, which offers nothing in return. (It’s a glorified payment processor and doesn’t actually do any video hosting.)
That there are vanishingly few alternatives to YouTube in terms of actually hosting videos (I know of Vimeo and, I guess nebula? Only because it gets continually pushed on me by creators) maybe tells you that the act of hosting videos at scale is kinda hard to do profitably. Or else there’d be tons of alternative options.
> Hosting videos isn’t cheap, who should cover that cost?
The ad revenue is in the billions and is steadily increasing each year. I would bet that the costs are more than covered.
You're changing the context of the discussion here. snailmailman had said:
> Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content [...] On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.
Saying they're unwilling to tolerate ads in YouTube. When asked why not just pay for YouTube premium, you came and said why you don't pay for YouTube premium. When pressed, you say "because YouTube's ad model will make them the money they need to host the videos."
Since you haven't said whether you block ads, there's two ways of interpreting this:
1. You don't block ads, you're ok watching YouTube ads, and you pay the creators directly through patreon. Great! But that makes your reply -- to why snailmailman doesn't pay for YT premium -- a little off-topic, because we were discussing ad-blocking.
2. OR, you're not ok watching YouTube ads, you block them, and then pay creators on patreon directly, meaning you don't care about covering the costs of hosting videos, because you don't believe YouTube should be showing you ads, and you don't want to pay them for the service. In which case we're back to "who should cover the costs." Maybe your answer is "other suckers, but not me", which is quite hypocritical.
If YouTube were to offer me a service that I think is worth paying for, then I would. I think that YouTube Premium is not a product worth paying for based on what they're offering, and also I noticed that I watch YouTube videos less and less over the years. Nebula and Curiosity Stream convinced me to pay for their services, so perhaps YouTube just has to step up?
Sure, YouTube probably takes more off the top than Patreon. But YouTube also splits it up based on who you’re watching. I probably watch 30+ YouTube channels per week, some of which I find on the explore page and don’t even know the name of. I would never subscribe to 30+ Patreons. I think YouTube Premium is a good compromise.
I lost a lot of faith in the decency of others a month ago when I heard a song on my car radio, looked at the display to see the artist and title info that comes from the radio station, and was met with "Bounty the quicker picker upper." That slogan stayed up for at least a minute. Every possible channel of communication will be sold for ad space.
That's the most "hacker" newsy thing to me. Whenever advertising critical articles come up, there's a large percentage of people commenting pro advertising. Yeah, I get it, you don't bite the hand that feeds you but come on. Does working in ad tech somehow influence your brains like the ones you are targeting?
My theory is that the people who fight against changing the status quo are just fundamentally opposed to change itself, not necessarily supporting the system as it currently stands. They know the ins and outs of the current system, and changing it means they have to dump knowledge and re-learn things - which they're fiercely opposed to doing. The enemy you know, over the enemy you don't, in a manner of speaking.
Those of us who can visualize futures starkly different than a continuance of the present day are a threat to those people who demand indefinite complacency and an unchanging world. Unfortunately for them, the universe is chaos and change is inevitable - so finding your own stability amidst the chaos is a skill more people need, such that necessary change might be embraced.
I've made a product. The people who use it, like it. But I have no online following or presence, and I'm really not the kind of charismatic person who could build one. All the "community" places where I could share it in good faith are incredibly hostile to self promotion, I think because of the wave of people selling vibecoded openai wrappers as language tutors.
I can pay £40 for reddit ads, and while it has negative ROI, it gives me lots of feedback that I can use to iterate. Sure, my project seems to be a commercial dead end - people find it valuable, but most people don't find it quite valuable enough to pay for the high cost of translation - but I still think those ads had a lot of value.
That said, I use an adblocker myself, I wish more intelligent people worked on rockets rather than targeting algorithms, and I do agree that ads have a negative effect in a lot of places - it's just that they do have a real (and IMO moral) utility in some places. If you banned advertising for everything, you'd just encourage bribing moderators to let you self-promote or ensure only people with existing followings can make things.
(it's https://nuenki.app, if anyone's curious)
If I want a product, it better be out of my own free will. If I wanted AI assisted ways to learn languages, I'd be perfectly capable of researching what's out there. If I see an ad, out of principle I won't pay a cent for anything, unless maybe it's literally the best thing since sliced bread.
Ads provide negative value to me as a consumer, therefore I want them banned.
But the economy! But the jobs!
What's the purpose of both of these? To address people's needs and wishes, or to plant new needs and wishes in the brain of consumers to then extract capital out of them?
If a product is worth creating it could be created, bought, and made profitable in an ad-free society as well. The problem is it's an arms race. A good product + ads will always win against an equivalent product without. Everybody has to do ads because everybody else does them. So going ad-free only works if everybody does it at once, and I believe that requires regulation. Of course I'm also not opposed to you buying ads to promote your product, I'm opposed to the fact that the market forces you to.
Trees haven't figured out how to all reach sunlight without using enormous resources to grow high. States haven't figured out how to all stay secure without spending enormous sums on defense. This situation is similar but I feel we have a good shot at saving ourselves a whole lot of trouble by heavily limiting the ways in which advertising can legally be done.
Billboards, commercials, and advertisements fall under "advertising", the act of trying to coerce consumers into buying a thing or patronizing a product through manipulation.
Promotion, on the other hand, actively involves someone talking directly with someone else about their product, or using some other form of demonstrable evidence of your product or works.
Let's take a few examples:
* An artist sharing their latest work to their social media feeds is promotion, while shoving it in your face with incentives to buy it at their website on a random forum post is advertising.
* A lawncare company that asks a client if they could leave a small sign behind promoting their services after a job is fine, but buying advertising time on a television spot with CGI graphics and staged visuals is not.
* Demonstrating your product at a kiosk at a mall or event is promotion, but spending money on a pre-roll YouTube spot with imagery deliberately cultivated to induce purchase is advertising
I am fine with promoting something; I am not fine with advertising something. Promoting often just takes time, which anyone can reasonably do; advertising costs money, and equating that to speech means admitting money is speech, which I think most folks would agree is a very bad thing.
If you're encountering issues with promoting your product, it's likely because it's coming off as advertising. Instead of saying "I built a new app over at this URL and would love your feedback", be more specific with what you're asking for: "Is my business model viable?", "Is the UX legible and accessible by folks using screen readers?", "Could someone try penetrating my tech stack before I go live?"
Promotion as a way of soliciting feedback has to be done in a specific way, else it is advertising. That's why forums and sites are very particular about anti-advertising/anti-spam/anti-promotion rules. As long as it's not the equivalent of shouting, "HEY, LOOK AT ME" through a megaphone that's unsolicited by the forum or venue inhabitants, generally most folks in my experience are going to be fine with it.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
--Upton Sinclair
I run DNS blocking at home which helps somewhat with shitty devices like Apple that don't give users any control. But my partner was looking at a local news site on her phone on the train the other day and I couldn't believe it. Literally an ad between every single paragraph plus one sticky ad at the bottom. It was like twice as much ad as content. Sickening.
The US used to forbid prescription drug advertising. That seemed to work.
Ads for liquor, marijuana, and gambling are prohibited in many jurisdictions.
The FCC once limited the number of minutes of ads per hour on the public airwaves. That limit was below 10% of air time in the 1960s.
The SEC used to limit ads for financial products to dull "tombstone" ads, which appeared mostly in the Wall Street Journal.
A useful restriction might be to make advertising non tax deductible as a business expense. That encourages putting value into cost of goods sold rather than marketing.
It would be very unpopular with the people I’d imagine.
The total amount of consumer products that can be sold is bounded by consumer income. Advertising mostly moves demand around; it doesn't create more demand, at least not in the US where most consumers are spent out.
Think of taxing advertising as multilateral disarmament. Advertising is an overhead cost imposed on consumers. If everybody spends less on advertising, products get cheaper. Tax policy should thus disfavor zero-sum activity.
Don't discount the opportunity that "advertising" presents to smuggle in a bunch of expenses that are either zero or negative on ROI.
Also this would be hard to implement. Tax law has a hard time discriminating costs. What if all the marketing is done by an Irish subsidiary?
it was just a gimmick in the end. yeah the city is cleaner, but i doubt there's even the slightest difference in sports betting in sao paulo vs places with outdoors, for example.
...and did the us forbid prescription drugs ads? thats literally all i see on daytime tv.
> Yeah the city is cleaner..
Cool. So it has positive effects on the city, without any negative effects on economic outcomes.
Cool. I'm in. Let's implement it everywhere
yeah you can make the city pretier or get less banners on your sites, whatever. advertising will still happen.
It feels like having a calmer public space is more in the public interest than reminding them to drink Miller Lite.
Just got back from a trip to Florida. Billboards along every freeway, and 75% of them are personal injury lawyers. If you’re a resident of Redmond, it is an obnoxious contrast.
Billboards let landlords skim extra money by making the public space significantly more hostile to everyone else. Fuck em.
Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life that someone else is trying to provide and the only missing link is that you don't know about it.
In both cases, it seems totally fine to have strict guardrails about what kinds of practices we deem not okay (e.g. banning advertising to children, or banning physical ads larger than some size or in some locations), but the extreme take of the article felt like it intentionally left no room for nuance.
>What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research, which means orienting business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable. The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the consumer, a patient reassured by psychodramas.[2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
[2]: Technopoly by Neil Postman
But, I’ll play along for a moment: If trying to convince people they need something that oftentimes they simply don’t isn’t manipulation, then what is it? It isn’t simply informative because it’s attempting to change one’s mind.
The best advertising for me is showing me a product and showing me how it's used -- the "Coca Cola will make you have friends and have a good time" style ads could be construed as manipulative, I totally get that, but if I see an ad that just says "here's the product, here's what it does" for a product that _actually_ solves a problem I have, that's pretty great in my book, and is a win-win for me and whoever makes the product.
What I see are endless billboards, posters, murals on the sides of buildings, cars, busses, etc. I see it everywhere. Its inescapable!
Must be nice living in that different world. Can I get a ticket to wherever you are??
Belongs in catalogues, store listings, the manufacturers website, product search engines, not forced into view when you’re trying to do something else.
It’d be perfectly reasonable even to have sites listing or aggregating new and updated products, or social media accounts that post about interesting [new or otherwise] products, as long as they’re not paid to place or promote products, too.
It becomes very clear when you move to a different country where you don't speak the language. Suddenly, advertisers cannot tell you that you need their products. And it is very emancipating mentally.
The nuance for me is that sometimes (mostly online) I see ads for a tool or game or product that just shows it in action, and while 95% of the time I still don't want it, there's the small fraction of the time where I think "Hey that actually looks nice" (and I'm fine with the other 95% that just show me the product).
Commercials for insurance are basically always terrible though; if you're advertising anything besides rates, coverage, or service, then what does it have to do with your product?
It seems like we mostly agree after all?
Journalists exist.
The best way to learn about new products is through influencers/reviewers/experts in their field. I'd even say its superior, which is why advertising companies ~sponsor~ bribe influencers to promote their products. Companies can also promote a product by sending it to reviewers.
So ads are not the only way to inform consumers, and the benefits IMO don't outweigh the cost.
In the same sentence, you give a possible solution and the reason why it wouldn't work.
Ban ads and companies are going to pay more and more for sponsored content to the point you can't differentiate what is legit from what is not.
Many “influencers” would have to go back to being amateurs. That’s ok. Some would accept backhanders, but they risk prosecution, which is actually possible [0].
[0] https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/government-orders-maori-infl...
This would also include down propaganda on social media.
We could then work backwards to define exceptions such as politicians speaking in moderated debates, signage in shops, etc...
Defining this correctly will be difficult, but that's the case with any law. GDPR was watered down, and I'm still glad it's there.
The cash flow is: you -> merchant -> manufacturer -> advertising department -> google -> influencer
So if ads go away, theres two scenarios:
A: the influencer was worth your money and you pay him directly
B: he's not worth your money
I know, I'm making quite a few assumptions about how the market will correct, so I will also point that many Twitch-Streamer and YouTube channels already are financed through crowdfunding. It's not unrealistic that people will pay for good content.
No I don’t think so. I would genuinely guess that 97% of the ads I see are irrelevant garbage or, more commonly, bids by products I know to raise awareness to increase the probability of their sale. I discover the vast majority of what I care about through word of mouth and I suspect I’d be fine without ads. There are so many negative externalities that it’s actually ridiculous.
People who come across the product in a shop or in/on a market.
Reading (unpaid) reviews.
There are vastly many ways that unbiased, factual information about a new product can be disseminated to those who are looking for it that are not advertising.
They’re paid to work on and like the product.
> People who come across the product in a shop or in/on a market.
The salespeople at the shop and market are paid to like and sell the product.
Even getting your product into a store shelf is a marketing activity, and chain stores charge a lot of money for the privilege.
> Reading (unpaid) reviews.
This can be a hobby, but most people need to make money from the work they do. This is why this area is covered by companies that employ and pay people to use and review products.
Also, this is recursive - where did this unpaid reviewer hear about the product?
> unbiased, factual information
What is an unbiased fact? Is vim better or emacs? How do you decide between the two? First you “hear” about them, and hopefully they didn’t “bias” you on way or another, and then because they’re (luckily) free, you can try both and decide for yourself what the “facts” are. But what about vscode and jetbrains and etc? They’re backed by corporations, and have marketing behind them, but they’re great products too!
You see where this is going once you generalize across industries? People pay for ads so that they can tell people what they think is an unbiased fact about their product. If they’re lucky, they also get word of mouth. But in a massively populated world with millions of products, this obviously creates a market for said “word of mouth”. And in turn, attracts bad actors, who lie about their product or manipulate you for politics etc. Some cases are clear cut, but others are not. It’s up to the viewer to decide at the end of the day.
Also, that we won't be able to make it perfect is not an argument against trying to improve.
Anyone?
This whole “advertising is useful” thing sounds like the spherical cow of marketing to me. It might make sense in abstract but it doesn’t reflect reality.
But it only works where you have specialized focus and experienced/informed consumers that are able to separate the sizzle from the steak. For example, doctors and other medical professionals are generally well qualified to assess the claims of pharmaceutical advertising, consumers are not - even though I am comfortable reading the fine print in such ads and even reading papers about clinical trials, I still rate my evaluative ability as mediocre compared to a professional.
Mass market advertising for general consumers is generally cancer, imho.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a major benefit of advertising. There are plenty of other ways to discover products, and most advertising is done by established brands to people who already know about them. How much advertising do Apple, Coca-Cola, Toyota, etc. do? How many people are unaware that their products exist?
I hate the step after raking where you have to use the rake and one hand to carry the leaves to the bin. There was an ad for "rake hands" where you just hold a small hand-formed rake in each hand and scoop them both.
Twenty bucks, vastly improved yardwork experience, and I would have literally never thought to look for something like that.
Also: sales. I have bought things in sales that I would not have bought otherwise (because its value to me is higher than the sale price but lower than the normal price) where I was only aware of the sales from ads.
If it were a truly demotic activity you would have a point. But as it is, lobbying (in the US at least) is almost exclusively by/for large/moneyed interests, and the part of it which isn't is considerably less effective than that which is.
That you don't bother engaging and others do doesn't give them an unfair advantage.
That being said, the US system sounds like a shitshow of bribery and corruption.
In Norway, we have a total ban on advertising on certain products, like alcohol and tobacco. We also have strict laws regulating advertising towards children and political messaging on TV and radio.
There is only one problem; these laws where made before the digital age, so they have been sidelined. Political parties buy ads on Facebook and Insta like there is no tomorrow and children are constantly exposed to ads on social media. Only the ban on alcohol and tobacco is somewhat successful.
The right next move would be to ban peronalized ads (ie tracking of personal data). This is the one factor that has made the advertising industry (with Google and Meta at the top) go completely of the rails.
It’s easy to dismiss advertising as just a profit engine for ad platforms, but that’s only part of the picture. At its best, advertising plays a meaningful role in solution and product discovery, especially for new or niche offerings that users wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It also promotes fairer market competition by giving smaller players a shot at visibility, and by making alternatives accessible to customers, without relying solely on monopolistic platforms or the randomness of word-of-mouth.
That said, today’s ad ecosystem is far from ideal - often opaque, invasive, and manipulative. Still, the underlying idea of advertising has real value. Fair advertising is a hard problem, and while reform is overdue, banning it outright would likely create even bigger ones.
It's only when some actors start advertising that the others must as well, so they don't fall behind. And so billions of dollars are spent that could have gone to making better products.
It's basically the prisoner's dilemma at scale.
Most consumers don't do extensive research before making a purchasing decision, or any research at all - they buy whatever catches their eye on a store shelf or the front page of Amazon search results, they buy what they're already familiar with, they buy what they see everyone else buying. Consumer behaviour is deeply habitual and it takes enormous effort to convince most consumers to change their habits. Advertising is arguably the best tool we have for changing consumer behaviour, which is precisely why so much money is spent on it.
Banning advertising only further concentrates the power of incumbents - the major retailers who decide which products get prime shelf position or the first page of search results, and the established brands with name recognition and ubiquitous distribution. Consumers go on buying the things they've always bought and are never presented with a reason to try something different.
A market without advertising isn't a level playing field, but a near-unbreakable oligopoly.
Why would it be an oligopoly any more than it is now? You go to a shop (in your city, or online), trust their curation, and buy something. If it's garbage, next time you will pick another shop or curator, or discuss with your friends / colleagues. Repeat until you find a place with satisfactory curation.
Why would this dynamic be bad? Why would I as a customer be better served by banners shoved in my face by the producers with the highest pockets?
In a world without advertising, our entire cultural approach to consumption would necessarily be different. Maybe it would be as you say. But, maybe we'd be more thoughtful and value-driven. Maybe objects would be created to last longer, and less driven by a constant sales cycle. Maybe craftsmanship would still be a valued aspect of everyday goods.
This is unbelievably untrue. Consider clothing brands, large and older labels have an immense advantage over newcomers. Newcomer word of mouth will never come close to some brand that has a store in every mall across the US.
With (say) Instagram ads alone, tiny labels can spend and target very effectively to create a niche, and begin word of mouth.
Gap and Lululemon would love it if all advertising was shut off today. It would basically guarantee their position forever because of the real estate and present day distribution Schelling point.
Or movies, basically all movies I went to a cinema for were because the trailers were played as ads somewhere. I’m not actively monitoring movie releases.
Even if you're right, think about the positive effect that'd have on society. The people with cool, interesting products would be the ones who put a little intentionality and effort into it, incentivizing everyone to be a little more thoughtful.
My wife saw an ad for "rake hands" -- I had never thought that a solution to my gripe would exist, but for twenty bucks a significant source of friction in my yard work is gone, and I would have never even thought to look for such a solution.
But imagine there's an event (party, fair, game jam) and the only way to know it's happening is to specifically search for it, there are no posters or advertisements online. Don't you think that some people that would have wanted to go would miss it because they never even noticed that there was an event?
And creepy/stalking advertisers grab all they can learn about my preferences. That's the state of ads on the internet for the past 20 years and I have never seen it "advertised" (haha) as a good thing.
That's the American spirit! As a European, it terrifies me that anyone would want to give advice to a doctor.
Realistically: no, you can’t stop big companies from advertising. Just having multiple shops bearing your logo gives you a level of brand recognition that’s hard to beat. Even if no one advertised, they’d still find ways to dominate the conversation and outshine competitors through sheer presence. You’re right that it becomes a kind of arms race, but in practice, trying to "opt out" often means falling behind.
No it wouldn't. If someone opens up a new restaurant a block away there's not going to be much word of mouth when it just opened, and even if they make a website, web search will prioritise the websites of existing restaurants because their domains have been around longer and have more inbound links.
1. Every one would see it, because they have eyes and leave the house.
2. Every one would be talking about it.
I hate ads but there would be no search engines without ads unless they were backed by governments
There is an alternative model where we simply pay professional product discoverers. Think influencers, but whose customer is the fan not the sponsor. It would be a massive cultural shift, but doesn’t seem so crazy to me.
I think the fundamental difference between advertising to discoverers vs advertising to consumers is that currently “discoverers” (platforms, content creators, billboard owners, etc.) make money directly from advertisers. Success as a “discoverer” is at least somewhat correlated to income (with more money, platforms can be more successful; content creators can create more compelling content; landowners can buy more billboards). If that money is coming from advertisers, you are biasing the market to prefer discoverers that can secure the most advertiser funding, which in turn preferences advertisers that can spend the most on advertising. This isn’t fundamentally bad, since a compelling product can make a lot of money that can then be spend on advertising, but it also creates anti-consumer incentives (like marketing something that is just good enough not to return as the next best thing). On the other hand, if discoverers are paid directly by consumers, that biases the market to prefer discoverers who identify products that bring the most value to consumers for their money.
That's what they said about patents, and so far it just means players with more money buy up more patents. Do they not buy up more advertising too? Coca-Cola and Google spend huge amounts on advertising just to make people feel okay with the amount of control they have over everything
That's a bit of a strawman argument.
> ...Coca-Cola and Google spend huge amounts on advertising just to make people feel okay with the amount of control they have over everything.
I agree - some reform is necessary. The current system often exacerbates the imbalance, but completely dismissing advertising ignores its potential role in leveling the playing field for smaller players when done responsibly.
At one time, definitely. Now though? We all carry around all of humanity's collective knowledge in our pockets. If you need a solution to a problem you have, if you need a plumber, if you need a new car... you an get unlimited information for the asking.
I don't remember the last time I responded to an advertisement. If I need things, I search Amazon/Etsy/local retailer apps or just go to a store. If I need contractors, I check local review pages to find good ones or just call ones I've used before. And some of that I guess you could call ads, but I mean in the traditional sense, where someone has paid to have someone put a product in front of me that I wasn't already looking for? Nah. Never happens.
2. Competition If you know better alternatives might exist, yes, you can search for them. But how do you search for better deals, services, or products for every little thing in your life? You don’t. Nobody has the time (or cognitive bandwidth) to proactively research every option. When done right, advertising helps level the playing field by putting alternatives in front of customers. And in doing so, it also pushes businesses to keep their offerings competitive.
I'm not convinced #2 is true — all ads imply the thing advertised is the best deal (where "best" is somewhere on cheap-quality spectrum), and the same limits to cognitive bandwidth mean we can't easily guess whatever points were missing from, at best, a 30-second highlights reel.
I think we would be fine without ads.
"something unpleasant that must be accepted in order to achieve a particular result"
> Advertising has consequences
Everything has consequences. That is actually a problem with many laws and rules which look only at upside and not downside.
Unfortunately and for many reasons you can't get rid of 'advertising' the only thing you can do is potentially and possibly restrict certain types of advertising and statements.
As an example Cigarette advertising was banned in 1971 on FCC regulated airwaves:
https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...
And regarding word of mouth: Is word of mouth for great products really random?
It doesn't actually work like that. A/B tests learn the highest-yielding ad. Psychology isn't robust enough to actually predict these things.
The internet would change fundamentally. The article lists social networks as things that would disappear, and good riddance, but we'd also lose (free) search engines.
Further, I'd argue that some forms of advertising are actually desirable. If I'm planning a vacation abroad, and want to make a reservation at a hotel, I'd typically go to booking.com or one of it's competitors. Those sites are pretty much 100% advertising, but how else am I gonna find a hotel on the other side of the planet, in a country I've never been before?
You also run into some tricky hairsplitting questions. Where do you draw the line on advertising? Are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? Or is that advertising? I don't want to outlaw online shopping entirely, it's extremely handy! What about search engine results from those webshops? Free search engines will disappear, but let's say I have a paid account and search for "buy dell laptop". Are the results advertising? How do you differentiate and define the cases legally?
I think it's a good idea, but it's gonna be quite tricky to implement well. And executing this idea poorly is potentially quite bad.
Getting it implemented at all is going to be hard: even well executed, this idea is going to have a huge impact on the economy, and people are not going to like that. This idea would be good for democracy, but ironically democracy is not good for this idea.
Can product recommendation sites _pay_ a video creator to create a funny video for their website? It's a win-win for everyone, right? Product recommendation website gets more visitors, popular creator gets money, and visitors get to see a funny video from popular creator.
If you allow ads on product recommendation websites, most entertainment websites will declare themselves "product recommendation".
I doubt this. more likely we'd end up in a scenario where, as a way of capturing market share, large companies subsidise their search engine with other branches of their business, for example, hosting. also since we're speaking hypothetically about government interventions, there's no reason that a government couldn't set up a publicly owned search engine, in fact one may already exist, I don't know
>Further, I'd argue that some forms of advertising are actually desirable. If I'm planning a vacation abroad, and want to make a reservation at a hotel, I'd typically go to booking.com or one of it's competitors. Those sites are pretty much 100% advertising, but how else am I gonna find a hotel on the other side of the planet, in a country I've never been before?
it's not advertising if it's on their own website
>You also run into some tricky hairsplitting questions. Where do you draw the line on advertising? Are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? Or is that advertising? I don't want to outlaw online shopping entirely, it's extremely handy! What about search engine results from those webshops? Free search engines will disappear, but let's say I have a paid account and search for "buy dell laptop". Are the results advertising? How do you differentiate and define the cases legally?
these are very simple dilemmas:
are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? yes, because you're on a webshop. practically all shops sell 3rd party products. advertising is listing products and services on non-commercial public places where people haven't chosen to engage with products
you search for "buy dell laptop", and the search engine has to produces the results that naturally bubble to the top from its algorithm
the issue I'd be more worried about with banning advertising is taking away the freedom it can allow small creators on places like Youtube, where now suddenly they'd be relying on subscriptions and/or donations, which can be a lot harder to come by than baseline advertising revenue. you'd get a lot more begging and pleading, and you'd get a lot more creators needing to rely on working under the umbrella of a larger organisation like they did before the internet
Thats the difference, you opted into the advertising by visiting a website which catalogs hotels. I think most people are against “push” advertising where you are fed an ad for something you were not looking for.
I really think people take so much for granted that even when they think about what they take for granted, they still can only scratch the surface.
> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear
No they wouldn't.. the business model would change. Facebook sells ads to businesses and entertainment to consumers. People still want to be entertained.
What about the positive effects from advertising? Many products which I never knew existed have gone on to improve my life.
To kill addictive digital content (especially those targeted at young people), just go after them directly. I agree the world will be a better place once we don't spend 10-16 years old online. But the advertising argument doesn't make any sense to me.
It subsidizes basically all modern entertainment, from the filmmaking and sports industries (through TV Shows and sports broadcasts, respectively), to musicians and amateur filmmakers (through Spotify and Youtube).
The costs of advertising are ultimately passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices for products and services, not unlike a VAT or sales tax. Because rich people spend more money than the poor (citation needed), they end up paying a lot more of this "tax" while getting the same amount of entertainment for it.
Targeted advertising only exacerbated these dynamics. Because high-spenders are very desirable customers to have, companies can now demand more money for the ability to target them, which turns advertising from a linear to a progressive tax.
Advertising turned the internet into a sort of public commons, with no government intervention and the inevitable inefficiencies and inflexibilities that come with those. It gave us free, high-quality video and voice calls to anywhere across the world, free unlimited texting, including picture messaging and group conversations, free video hosting for everybody, regardless of scale, free music (through Youtube, Spotify and the radio), with at least some compensation to artists, free movies and TV shows (on free-to-air TV as well as through services like Pluto), excellent free educational content (e.g. 3b1b, university lecturers hosted on Youtube at no charge), as well as cheaper entertainment overall through ad-supported tiers.
I think framing things this way is important when discussing advertising regulation. Maybe we want more cheap groceries, don't care about cheaper luxury cars and don't mind less free entertainment, so maybe we should ban grocery ads and encourage more Mercedes ads. Maybe we're fine with less free entertainment if it gets us fewer alcoholics, so we ban ads for alcohol. Those are tradeoffs worth thinking about, perhaps tradeoffs worth making, but they are tradeoffs, and it is important to be conscious of that.
Even if advertisers make more money from the rich (citation needed), the poor are still disproportionately negatively effected. I would argue that it's less ethical to persuade someone with $100 to their name to spend $10 on something they don't need, than to persuade someone with $1,000,000 to spend $500 on something they don't need.
To bolster this argument, look at the things that are most advertised to the poor: alcohol, gambling, fast food, and predatory loans (including predatory auto financing). The wealthy, meanwhile, are more likely to be targeted with ads for lifestyle goods: health foods, travel, gym memberships.
I do remember a major scandal that occurred in the 1980's when somebody posted an advertisement to usenet. At the time, there was a lot of online discussion about why this was prohibited. I looked this up, and found that the internet backbone (the NSFNET) was funded by the NSF, who enforced an acceptable-use policy, prohibiting Backbone use for purposes “not in support of research and education.” [https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/253671.253741]
So yes, it's possible, because we already did it once.
When we talk about banning ads, we tend to underestimate the power of capitalism and consumerism, while overestimating how much people truly value the privacy of their online privacy.
Tell me, do you think Roger Federer really appreciates that watch he's selling you? Does he really use that coffee machine that he sells, and thinks it's the best one?
We know what his motivation is, he is not your friend who bought a watch and a coffee machine, used them, and recommended them to you. He gets paid by the producers of the stuff he endorses.
Plainly, advertisers have discovered a loophole in the human psyche, and are exploiting it. We evolved to take in recommendations from people we know, and billboards/TV/etc are close enough to the real thing to trigger _something_ in us that doesn't just work when it's a non-celebrity whose face we don't know. The effect is big enough that celebrities get paid a gigantic amount of money to pretend they are someone you trust and recommend some product they never even thought about until they got given the deal.
I think we should tax that kind of thing. I'm not restricting his free speech. Roger is free to stand in front of the opera in Zürich and tell random strangers that they should buy the coffee machine. But if you put it in mass media, there should be a gigantic tax.
That said this article glosses over the first amendment which absolutely needs to be considered because (at least in the United States) that is the big barrier to any sort of restriction.
Also the idea of what constitutes an ad. Billboards? What about large signs showing where a store is? Are people with big social media accounts allowed to tell us about their favorite products? Only if they don't get money? What if they get free products? We'll have financial audits I assume to make sure they aren't being sneaky. No more sponsored videos? What about listing the patreons that made the video possible?
How will this be sold to the people that need ads for their small business? We'll need a majority support to pass a constitutional amendment.
Anyway, this seems impossible but good luck!
1. You probably only know about half the things you like, enjoy, and use because of advertising. Did you see a trailer for a movie on YouTube you wanted to watch? That is an ad for a movie. Did you get a demo disc for a new band at a party or club in the 90s? That is an ad. Did you see the concert lineup poster? Ad. No one complains when advertising is done well and provides utility.
2. Ads subsidize things you enjoy. Browsers, search engines, television, your tv, most websites, are all subsidized through advertising. You can say would prefer to just pay full price for it and avoid the ads, but most people clearly would not like to when given the option.
3. What even is an ad? What is the line? Are store signs an ad? Are movie trailers? Defining what an ad is and isn’t is messy and a bit silly.
4. The alternative may be worse. What happens when traditional ads stop working? Businesses still need to get their message out, so what do they do? They hire YouTubers to play talk positively about their product, they wine and dine journalists and publications for favorable coverage, which becomes easy because without ads they are hurting for revenue. If ads were banned this would get worse.
It is nice to opine about a utopia without ads, and believe me, I often do, but the reality is advertising has been around for thousands of years and integral to how business and even society works.
Truth is, you pay the full price anyways, because the money earned through ads is also paid by you.
Even worse: you additionally pay the advertising industry
> Businesses still need to get their message out, so what do they do? They hire YouTubers to play talk positively about their product, they wine and dine journalists and publications for favorable coverage, which becomes easy because without ads they are hurting for revenue. If ads were banned this would get worse.
No, we wouldn't see it at all, because that's advertising.
E.g. If a business want to run an ad in the newspaper, go for it. But if they want to follow me around on the internet and collect information on everything that I do, then they should be required to record what they collect. Congress could then vote to make laws introducing taxes on that quantity.
Once this stuff is measured then appropriate counter measures could be taken to discourage socially damaging enterprises.
Advertising certainly has plenty of negative externalities, but the positive externalities of the free ad-funded services I mentioned are absolutely mind-boggling. Try to imagine living without them (if you couldn't afford to pay for them yourself).
For instead of your ISP spending 20% of their resources advertising (because otherwise they'd lose market share to ISPs that are advertising), they could likely offer email hosting and basic web hosting without you paying any more than you do currently. Competition between companies should be directed towards productive ends (improving their product) else it just becomes a giant zero-sum game of resource wastage.
Using those is worst idea ever. ISPs are all horrible, and the only good thing is you can switch to the other one. The last thing you want is to tie your email/website, something you can't easily change, to them.
2) Wikipedia is not ad-driven, and remains as useful, if not more useful than any ad-driven competitor.
Make it illegal to make statements that are not objectively true. E.g. you can't say that your product is "the best", you can only say specifically how it is better.
Put restrictions on advertising an idealized version of a product and then selling a lesser version. E.g. the difference between what fast food ads show versus what you get. I'm sure it would be difficult to completely fix that since it's so subjective, but we could probably get incremental improvements.
These are often lies too but its the subtext not the text
Improved health is a good one. It doesn't really mean anything.
Anyway, what I'm saying is that saying true things is what we already require. Human nature will pervert that system and follow the letter of the law; that's the literal system we have now.
But humanity has never been free of non-current forms of advertising
> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear
No the wouldn't, you can still monetize addictive without ads
> Think about what's happened since 2016 ... fracture our social fabric along existing fault lines.
Just think about what happened before 2016 and how many times the social fabric had been fractured (sometimes also with foreign actors) ...
For example, highly relevant PSAs and warnings could be considered “ads.” They can be every bit as obnoxious as “penis pill” ads, but they convey information that may be of life and death importance.
The placards outside professional offices are ads; possibly the oldest form of advertising.
In-store signage are ads, and can cost sellers a lot of money.
You could argue that “shelf-stackers,” and “endcap displays” employed by supermarkets, are a form of advertising.
Sales people rely on personal relationships, and get quite skilled at making every conversation they have, into a sales pitch (which can get annoying).
Promotion is a very complex system, and often goes far beyond simple signage. For many businesses, it’s a matter of life and death.
People that run businesses probably can’t live without them, and are willing to pay a pretty penny for ads.
One thing that might be relevant, are “ad books,” like the old-fashioned Yellow Pages, “pennysaver” papers, or the “brand books,” used by designers. These are ads, but gathered into a place where they are expected, and actively sought out.
In the last century, we often called variants of these, “catalogs.”
But there is a certain kind of advertising that is detrimental. My first thought is Amazon 'sponsored' products. Allowing companies to pay money to put inferior products at the top of search results is bad for society. Same goes for Google sponsored search results. Sponsored content in general is terrible. People that have gained your trust selling you things and not actually telling you they are being paid to do so. There are many many digital ads that would not be allowed IRL because they would be stopped for false advertising by regulators.
Like most things in life these days, the problem is not the thing itself. The problem is the Wild West that is the internet where there is minimal regulation allowing people to lie, cheat and get away with it.
Stay away from the algorithmic feeds, instead get to know your authors and choose them explicitly. Stay away from the personalized ads, pay for content you care about, block what can be blocked, avoid the rest. Learn active banner blindness: catch your attention drifting and look away. Uninstall reels, tiktok, youtube, sanitize your life from short term attention grabbers. Turn off that TV. Mute your car radio. Practice focus: take a book and set a timer. Lock yourself up in a room with a hobby project. Meditate. Set up a ritual with a friend or family, as long as you still got any. Make smalltalk to strangers. Get to know your neighbors. Plan that getaway. Choose your life!
Laws don't get tired or can be forced through dark patterns. Laws are generally there to allow us to expect something from everyone at the same time.
That would shed some initial societal parasites. See what's left, and then go after the next biggest / grossest topic in the space.
I could get behind that particular brandishing of chainsaw.
Big tech has been mass-spamming us with unsolicited content for decades and driving monopolization, centralizing opportunities towards those who can talk the talk and away from those who can walk the walk. So we've been getting lower value for our money and also losing jobs/opportunities which has made it harder to earn money.
It's crazy that big tech is allowed to spam hundreds of millions of people with unsolicited content but if any individual did it on the same scale, they'd be in jail.
It's hilarious. For a forum where people pretend to be smart it's absolutely missing critical thinking.
I feel it's impossible to get rid of those Ads platforms such as Google or Microsoft. Businesses need them. If you ask me, I'd say, government should levy a heavy tax on Ads , so basically like gas stations, they are only allowed say 10% of profit margin, and they must cap their ads somehow. Ads is basically a public service, and every public service, if not run by the State, should only allow a very small margin of profit, like public transit and such.
Also big tech would be incentivized to sell even more user data, as their business would still mostly exist, either via subscriptions, or through the now even more profitable user data market with more expensive targeted shilling.
Consider that advertising is mostly (not 100%) a zero-sum game. It's not zero sum when it helps to inform people of products and services that would make their life better, that they would willingly have sought out and purchased if not for their lack of knowledge that the product existed.
However, there are lots of extremely common situations where advertising is just a net drain on society:
* when it encourages people to buy things they don't need, exploiting our monkey brains' desire for the seratonin that accompanies buying stuff.
* when everyone already knows what's out there in the market, and it's just massive empires fighting for market share, like coke and pepsi, or various car companies, trying to keep their products in people's minds. They're just playing tug-of-war and very little changes.
* again like with soda, or cigarettes, or vapes, or fast food and junk food, where the products being advertised are actually worse for your health than the default alternative (drinking tap water, not smoking, cooking food at home). Perhaps people enjoy these things, but there is a hedonic treadmill effect where you quickly get used to them and are no better off than if you just avoided them.
* when advertising makes public spaces less pleasant to be in. And when it's distracting to drivers, increasing the chances of an accident.
* when advertising makes websites hard to use
* when the advertising industry vacuums up tons of talented people with the attraction of the money they would make, who might otherwise have gone into careers that are more beneficial to the rest of society
I don't doubt that shills and astroturfing would still exist or possibly get worse if you did nothing about it -- but you could ban that too. You wouldn't catch everyone, but the threat of punishment would make it much less likely for people to be willing to participate in that sort of stuff.
I do think that we would need a replacement for the small, actual valuable thing that advertising provides, which is providing information. I think it would be great to allow sorts of "ad indexes" or "product indexes" which are websites specifically dedicated to aggregating information about all the products available in a given market. Maybe search engines are already good enough for this purpose. Honestly, when I want to learn about what's out there because I'm getting into a new hobby or something, I just do the google-reddit trick like searching for "reddit good value electronic piano" and reading about what other people like.
Likewise for politics, it would be fantastic if every election had a website where candidates could submit their policy platform and potentially a video or two (though I like the idea of JUST text for this) where you can read about them. It's hard enough to find out about candidates for local elections already.
So I'm very much in favor of trashing the whole thing. I think it's a case where advertising benefits those who do it (and in very rare cases, consumers) but mostly just has massive negative externalities. Classic case for either banning it, or putting a steep tax. Usually I'd prefer the latter (as in the case of carbon taxes), but I think taxing ads would be very complicated and the tax rate would probably instantly make most ads vanish anyway, so I think a ban makes more sense.
Big companies where revenues are based on marketing would collapse, the market fragments (which is good), smaller companies are created instead, better diversity of local products and services. Better wealth distribution. More money for the government, hopefully better public services.
With less flashy products and services, people have a better purchasing power, even considering they'll have to pay for services they use, like reviews. Review companies would need strict controls to be put in place against corruption.
It would probably also change a lot of nonsensical landscapes (ex: sports)
Advertising is evil.
IIRC there is a Dilbert comic strip about that.
> Clickbait [...] would become worthless overnight
Advertisement is not the only incentive. E.g., the Veritasium YouTube channel's host explicitly switched to clickbait, explaining it by his intent to reach a wider audience. Another example is clickbait submission titles on HN, not all of which are for the sake of advertisement (unless you count HN submissions in general as advertisements themselves, of course).
> When I say advertising, I also mean propaganda. Propaganda is advertising for the state
Not necessarily for the state, the usual definition includes furthering of ideas in general. In more oppressive regimes, propaganda of certain ideas is actually banned, as it used to be in even more places ("heresy" and suchlike). Combined with selective enforcement, it is as good as banning all propaganda. It may be a particularly bad example of such a ban, but still an illustration of the dangers around it.
I think a better path towards the world without (or almost without) commercial advertising is not via coercion, but as kaponkotrok mentioned in another comment, via education and public discussion (which may also be called "propaganda"), shifting social norms to make such advertisement less acceptable. People can make advertisements unprofitable if they will choose to: not just by ignoring them (including setting ad blockers), but also by intentionally preferring products not connected to unpleasant and shady tactics, including those beyond advertisement: slave labor and other human rights violations, unsustainable energy sources, global warming, animal cruelty, monopolies, proprietary or bloated software and hardware are some of the common examples. Social norms and such enforcement seem to be less brittle than laws are, and harder to turn into an oppression mechanism.
Although, since I brought up monopolies and other issues, perhaps state agencies may also usefully assist with restriction of advertisement, as they do with those. Social norms and laws are not mutually exclusive, after all.
Some thought experiments:
What do [search engines, social networks, newspapers] look like? I assume they'd all be paid and you'd get some free tastes and then decide which you'd pay for in the long term (à la kagi).
By removing the third party payer, the service provider has no incentive to do anything for them, whether aligned or not with the user. That is the big plus.
What about all the money that companies use to promote their products and services through advertisements and marketing? Some portion of that would probably go to making their products better. The rest... from their standpoint, how do they even get a potential customer to know they exist? That's tough.
All money and energy spent on advertising might be funneled into employees and workers. We would see a huge rise in promoting a company's products through their employees through any medium possible.
If you're a company, you can't pay a third party to get the word out, so you massively increase public relations spending and attempt to get publications to do articles on your product.
We would see all advertising hide under the guise of public relations: PR firms would sky rocket in workforce and there would be many more "review" sites and "news" sites. SEO would increase even more than it is now.
That said, I don't think it's appropriate to outlaw all advertising. It should still be allowed in places where you'd be open to it anyway: in stores and other places where you spend money anyway, and in specialized publications that exist for people who intentionally want to be advertised to.
However, for when you're buying something, upselling (any questions by the seller that may result in you buying something you didn't intend to buy originally) should be illegal. It feels very insulting to me.
While advertising messages may not be themselves particularly important for free speech and can be even detrimental to it, e.g., propaganda, sites themselves disseminate speech and are often third-party ad-financed. What could be a good business model for them (other than direct payments)?
In terms of “let’s try this surprising new change in the laws,” I’d rather see it become illegal to collect a lot of information about people. Maybe we can consider what Facebook/Google and data brokers do something like stalking.
It becomes a question of what truly is an ad?
That said I appreciate this sort of thought; it would even be nice for it to be implemented, but whether it could be enforced is another question. At that point it then becomes a question of who you allow to advertise.
For a long time, hedge funds were not allowed to solicit investments publicly under rule 502c of reg D.
I could see grounds to restrict things further; I’m sick of restless leg syndrome drug treatment ads…
The best ads and brands are an iconic part of our culture - something cherished and celebrated by many. I think this is worth keeping in mind at least when talking about banning advertisements.
Of course, a ban on advertising will never happen, because it's very useful to some people. I'm more concerned with the general pattern of thinking that goes:
1. I greatly dislike thing and think thing is bad. 2. Thing should therefore be illegal.
We should be less eager to use the power of law to mold the world to our preferences. It should be a solemn undertaking to use the law! It's an instrument of coercive power and should really be held in reserve as much as possible. Otherwise, we're all just petty tyrants sniping one another for minor transgressions.
There are many things that are very bad that nonetheless must be legal in a free society! I realize this is a uniquely American right, but I nonetheless believe "hate speech" must remain legal. It is bad, yes. I do not like it. I really wish it didn't happen. However, it is markedly less bad than entrusting some byzantine bureaucracy or benevolent dictator to adjudicate the meaning of hate speech. I greatly prefer a world with hate speech to one in which we apply legal authority to eliminate hate speech.
I am no longer into hackathons, but I would pay good money for such a product. Bonus points if it is styled like Nada's glasses from They Live.
In civilized countries, this could be done by taxation (limit the mass) and regulation (limit the excesses.)
Use the country of the advertisment target audience to decide which juridiction applies.
I'm pretty sure advertisers have to be aware of the country their targeting, given that they know me better than my spouse.
```Populists exploit ad marketplaces, using them to bypass traditional media gatekeepers```
I want to believe that the author is hopelessly naive, and not a more nefarious actor. These traditional media gatekeepers are not by any means friendly to democracy; they're literal tools of the state, and actively work against the interests of the populace. I say this without a hint of irony: I trust social media more.
It's not an honest what if because it finds no downsides or tradeoffs nor does it try to define what exactly would be ilegal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_United_State... [2] https://www.wallis.rochester.edu/assets/pdf/wallisseminarser...
I also say this without a hint of irony: I don't trust two shits on either side of the aisle.
Modern advertising doesn't just sell products, it sells our own attention back to us at a premium. What started as "connecting products to people who need them" has warped into engineering digital environments that hack our baseline neurological responses.
The most disturbing part is that most people inside the machine know it. I've sat in rooms where we've explicitly designed systems to maximize "time on site" by exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities. The language we use internally is more clinical than predatory, which makes it easy to avoid moral questions.
What's wild is how this piece frames advertising as a relatively recent phenomenon. It's right - for 99% of human history, we made purchasing decisions based on community knowledge and direct information, not carefully engineered psychological triggers that follow us around.
Sure, banning all advertising sounds extreme, but it's worth asking: what would we actually lose? Product information would still exist. Reviews would still exist. Word-of-mouth would still exist. We'd just lose the sophisticated machinery designed to bypass our rational decision-making.
The "free speech" counter-argument has always struck me as disingenuous. Nobody believes they have a constitutional right to interrupt your dinner with a telemarketing call.
* First 3 months 9.99€, 42.99€ per month thereafter, 1 year minimum
One of the key distinguishing factors is that "bad" advertising is intentionally deceptive. The explicit objective is how to overstate colloquially while technically saying something that is not untrue if interpreted by a genie or monkey's paw. Advertisers run war rooms and focus groups to make sure that the message they are promoting is verifiably and scientifically misinterpreted by the target audience while having legal review so that if it comes to court they can say: "Technically, your honor..." we meant something different than what we explicitly and intentionally aimed for.
The standard is backwards. The more money you spend on advertising, the more intentionally truthful it should be. You should run focus groups to verify that the message is not misinterpreted to your benefit the larger the advertising campaign. When you go to court and say: "Technically, your honor..." you should immediately lose (after reaching certain scales of advertising where you can be expected to have the resources to review your statements). Misinterpretation should be a honest surprise occurring despite your best efforts, not because of them and the litmus test should be if your efforts were reasonable at your scale to avoid such defective speech.
The standard is trivially assessable in court: Present the message to the target audience and ask them their interpretation. Compare it to the claims of deception. If the lawyer says: "Technically, your honor..." they lose. However, they can present evidence that they made reasonable efforts to avoid misinterpretation and that the specific form of the misinterpretation is unlikely or unexpected.
The standard is easily achieved by businesses. Make intentionally truthful claims and have your advertising teams check and test for misinterpretation. Err on the side of caution and do not overstate your claims to your benefit and the potential detriment of your customers. If you think "technically speaking", you are on the wrong track. If you would not tell that candidly to your relatives or friends, you should probably stop.
It is not like people do not know they are being deceptive, they just need to be held to it.
In most jurisdictions there are, at times weaponized, limitations, and that's the tradeoff those jurisdiction landed on.
I don't see how this proposed limitation could produce acceptable weaponizations.
Just think for a second how outlandish these would sound with such limitation in place:
- The ban on "persuasive content" is used to shut down political dissent labeled as "unwanted influence."
- Independent journalists are silenced when their reporting is categorized as "promotional advertising."
- Fundraising for humanitarian causes is outlawed as "solicitation advertising."
- Religious discussions are prohibited as "advertising spiritual beliefs" or "donation to the organized religion."
- Medical awareness campaigns are shut down as "advertising health concerns."
- Environmental activism is criminalized as "advertising eco-agendas."
There would be just no end of these.
All of the problems you listed can be prevented from becoming endemic by having clear definitions in the law and generally reasonable judges. But if our judges are generally unreasonable, we are screwed either way. So what’s the downside to setting up a clear law against advertising?
Thus as always in society finding the right approach and right way of regulating isn't easy.
Companies provide what the customer wants. And, as the adage goes, if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Advertisement-funded “news” isn’t meant to enrich the reader/viewer — it is meant to attract the reader/viewer.
I think that perverted incentive has always existed with it, but the internet ad technology has really killed the information content. And now we’re have society-scale problems with misinformed citizens.
I don’t think industry will solve the problem. If a company allowed users to opt out and pay, their richest customers would do that and those were the ones most valuable to advertise to. So, offering an opt-out probably loses them money (and increases costs).
I think the news industry should be advertising free. I’d have to think on if it should also have govt funding, but that often gets co-opted.
When's the last time you paid for a newspaper?
If any French speakers are interested, I believe it was this YouTube channel (which is very interesting anyway for discussions about fascism, advertising, manipulation, etc.): https://youtube.com/@hacking-social
- Job offers
- Jobseeking
- Dating
- Public service announcements
- Word-of-mouth
- Sponsoring
- Political campaigns
- Fundraisers
- Endorsements
- Recommendations
And many others
If you ban all forms of advertising, society will grind to a halt, even before considering free speech. How can a business be successful if no one knows that it exists? Advertising connects people who need something to people who provide it. It absolutely essential to society and in a sense, it predates humans, if we consider mating as a form of advertising, like peacocks using their tails as some kind of a biological billboard.
I understand what the author means, he is annoyed by ad breaks, banners, and tracking, we all are, and he would like to see less of them, we all do, except whoever makes money over these banners that is.
The author suggests banning paid-for advertisement. But how far will it go? For example, you want to print flyers to promote your business. Is it illegal for the print shop to print your flyers, as they are making money on advertising. Classified ads will become illegal too, forget about craigslist and the likes.
It kinds of remind me of some "abolitionist" laws on prostitution that some countries have. Prostitution is legal, based on the idea that people own their bodies and people have the right to have sex, but everything surrounding prostitution is not, including advertising and pimping. The definition for pimping can go far, for example renting a room to a prostitute can be considered pimping. The idea is essentially to make prostitution illegal without writing it explicitly. A blanket ban on advertising will do that, but for all businesses.
As always, for every complex problem there is a solution which is clear, simple and wrong.
It means the expensive product/service gets your attention, coz it can afford a higher bid, instead of the one that's better for you. It also sets a high floor on prices.
To some extent the bidding process was needed when there was inherent scarcity of inventory to place information (e.g. billboards or the 1 local radio station), but there's no scarcity online. Why can't we just have a web where product/service info is listed, and people can seek that info through some search engine?
Problem starts, when I'm scrolling $socialWebsite and I see ton of biking ads, because some Orwellian ad network is tracking me through time & space.
Then content starts to serve as means to push ads into my eyes whenever I dare to open them. If content is crap - doesn't matter - if I switch to other source ad will follow.
What's worse - many people were brainwashed into believing that's normal. I remember guy from Chrome team, who published draft for web attestation. He was convinced he's doing good thing because brands have "right" to be sure they're getting real eyeballs and he was just making this process "better" for the users.
However I don't see how it affects my arguments. I'm generally ok with cars - doesn't mean I'm OK with monster trucks on every corner of my city.
Movies set in our world, for example, should be allowed to show real cars, real phones, etc. But that is nigh impossible to prevent from becoming a fight for getting your product placed. And lots of similar places.
It might be possible to outlaw ads targeted more narrowly than a bit of content (i.e. advertisers have to choose, ahead of publication, what content to put their ads next to.) Combining this with banning some of the more direct advertising might work. Though perhaps a world where advertising is purely done through product placement is also horribly distopian.
> The protagonist (P. Burke) is a lonely, severely depressed teenager. After a failed suicide attempt, an international telecommunication company offers her a new job -- to become a remote operator of a public celebrity. She is given a new persona "Delphi", and her new job is to buy products publicly to advertise them.
The protagonist is basically a Youtuber/Instagram influencer/TikTok streamer today.
The we have any robustness towards propaganda/ads is that we're being bombarded with contradicting arguments.
In a society without would be more susceptible to propaganda. Just just we outlaw it, just doesn't stop bad actors.
That there are lots of places we forbid advertising. Bill boards along the road. Content targeted minors.
We are also lots of advertising we could outlaw: regulated medicin, loans, gambling.
We could regulate what ads can say: products must be sold advertised price (fine print not allowed).
Lots of things could we that don't outlaw all advertising. Look around world you'll find many examples such regulations.
I don't think this is as much as a "societies choose" as "some societies have no choice." The municipality I'm in now struggles with property tax revenues and has to stoop to what I'd call predatory revenue streams (gambling, ads, etc) to make up the difference. And it creates a feedback loop.
My 2 cents: Ban payed advertising online, including banner ads, search ads, and pre-roll / inter-roll ads (e.g. youtube and instagram).
This is a clearly defined market and probably causes a plurality of the negative impact of adverts (especially when connected with the incentive to algorithmically addict users to show them more ads).
I really like the idea. Fuck advertising.
Advertising is just psychological manipulation. Any argument that there's "good" advertising that respects the target and is merely informative... well, maybe there is, but it's overshadowed by the other 99.9% of the garbage.
Implementing this feels impossible, though. There would be disagreement as to what constitutes an ad. I disagree with the author that advertising isn't an exercise of free speech; I think that would be a huge roadblock in any country that enshrines free speech rights.
But man, that would be great.
internet have very few entry points, and they are all corrupted by advertising.
The key word here is "current forms of advertising". Advertising as a concept has been around since the invention of commerce and trade, so pretty much since the beginning of human civilization.
So sure, you can have specific issues with browser popups or data collection or billboards or whatever else, but saying "any form of paid and/or third-party advertising" should be illegal is nonsensical. Unless you can make money and trade illegal advertising will continue to exist.
I’m very fine with ads on private spaces. In a guitar magazine, a few ads for new music equipment actually makes the product better and is a win for everyone.
I understand that this distinction has a gray area, but we could start with the black and white cases (Vermont has tried)
Since its positive impact on society is limited, this would be a way to channel some of that mind-warping wealth into actual civic improvement...
Harassment is just a mild precursor to outright force. Advertising is just a mild precursor to intellectual force. Advertising is to indoctrination as physical harassment is to physical force.
Serving size: 1200 words / 60 seconds
Total commercial advertisement content: 600 words
Total US Government sponsored content: 300 words
Total foreign government sponsored content: 100 words
Total NGO sponsored content: 200 words
% of daily content of society shaping propaganda: 30%
% of daily content of subliminal content: 15%
% of daily content of emotional manipulation: %40
% of daily content of Gen5 warfare: 20%
And people who object to advertising live in a world in which their daily lives are provided for by companies that depend on advertising to exist.
As PT Barnum said "Without promotion, something terrible happens... nothing!" and all the companies that make up our economic ecosystem depend on things happening …. sales, which don’t happen without promotion.
Advertising has been around since Ancient Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago and will be around in 5,000 more years.
"We should improve society somewhat."
"Yet you participate in society. Curious!"
> Advertising has been around since Ancient Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago and will be around in 5,000 more years.
Someone probably made the same argument about slavery hundreds of years ago, but here we are.
What constitutes advertising vs marketing?
Does product placement count as advertising or marketing?
Does opening up a pop shop count as advertising or marketing?
So much to this, ultimately we do need to regulate advertisements. But I am not sure we can survive without them.
i would rather live in a world of public transportation, with less children and vegan oriented (climate change == enviroment) without people with guns and only at the hands of an effective police; 100x times than an ad. free world...
wrote this at my Android without a single ad. notification, via Firefox along ublock. been a while i watch an ad.
I don't see a problem with criminalizing big ad companies, ad markets, and ad middlemen. I think that would solve a good chunk of the issue.
I see it as a privacy issue.
There would still be advertising, and maybe even some personalized advertising, but in many cases they might decide the risk isn't worth it.
It would also impact data-brokers and operations that don't strictly rely on direct-to-consumer advertising, like background checks, but credit scores, sales leads, etc.
This sounds like someone who was born intoo an era of internet advertising. As opposed to someone who has been expoosed to adevrtising over many forms of media, the internet being only a recent addition.
The early internet had no advertising. Commercial use of the computer network against the rules.
The web-based companies comprising "Big Tech", while they dominate today's internet by acting as allegedly "necessary" intermediaries and conducting surveillance, appear to have no viable business model to stay "big" in this scenario: where the computer network does not allow advertising, let alone commercial use.
Thus, the question "What if we banned all advertising" sounds extreme, unrealistic, the product of myopia, all-or-nothing thinking. Advertising will always be "legal". But historically man has regulated where it can be disseminated/placed.
A more interesting question might be "What if we had a computer network where advertising was prohibited or limited". About 35 years ago we did. Then the rules against commercial use were removed. Now people are complaining. People who never used the network in the time before advertising was allowed.
Imagine what it would be like to have a computer network without advertising using the computer and networking technology we have today.
Maybe this network could be built on top of the internet, as an overlay.
Make no mistake, there will always be computer internetworks that allow advertising. But the first ones didn't. And there could be ones in the future that don't.
Many small companies would go out of business, that’s what. Yes we definitely need advertising reform, but advertising is a very important part of any business if they want to be successful. Making it illegal would cut a lot of businesses off from their potential customers. The author doesn’t seem to propose any alternative solution for this.
Say we implement this, a natural consequence would be mega-corporations providing every service possible. My Yamaha bike displays a message to promote a Yamaha music keyboard, then expanding to a new Yamaha bookstore or grocery chain.
No money exchanged out of the first-party Yamaha holding.
We would need to improve the proposal to prevent that too.
This website is about blocking advertising because they're often predatory and invasive.
> Outlawing advertising would help protect and reinvigorate our minds and democracy.
Practice what you preach. Or don't, if you just want to make a quick-hit blog post.
One problem that would come up… It would be very hard to get word out of new (better) products. If you have a great product that doesn’t lend itself to word of mouth, how will anyone know if you can’t advertise?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580586 - 8 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558438 - 4 comments
First of all, I dispute that "human autonomy" is the basis for the immorality of slavery. Rather, it is the preservation of human dignity. The subtle difference being, you can cede a certain amount of your autonomy without losing any dignity such as when taking on a specialized role to function in a society (in other words, a job). Actions that violate another's autonomy has some overlap with actions that violate another's dignity but "some overlap" is all that is really there to it.
"Human attention is sacred" therefore...what? Would, for example, schools count as a violation of human attention? A good book? A perfectly fine movie with a smattering of product placement? There's no telling what the blast radius of your principle here is.
Rather than thinking of human attention as a sacred inviolable thing, it is more akin to a currency each of us can spend. We just have to facilitate wiser spending.
I hosted my own site, in my bedroom. I hosted a counter-strike server, too. Comcast hadn't shut hosting down yet.
Anyway, that has nothing to do with online banking, services, security, apps, media. Let's just use youtube--one of the greatest sites of all time, hands down. Huge utility, huge entertainment. Free, via advertising. Would have never happened without it.
There's so, so much trash, webspam, etc on the modern web. I hate it, too. I don't even have warm feelings about youtube anymore. But advertising opened a lot of doors.
They still haven't. I host a site from my Comcast connection just fine.
I'll gladly pay 25 cents to read an article from a news website, but I won't subscribe for a whole year for $25+, especially when there's dozens/hundreds of sites.
Obviously credit card transaction fees would be a problem, but that could be mitigated by depositing say $15 at a time and deducting from the balance each time.
So what's keeping this from being a reality?
Card transaction fees here in Norway can be extremely low if the merchant uses BankAxept, much lower than Visa, Mastercard, etc. And it even works if the network is down.
Hiring engineers is even worse. I think about $20/hr should suffice but there’s this big fuss kicked up about “they’re not willing to pay enough”.
And I don't think ad revenue is paying the bills so I'm not sure what other options there are. I just went to a few major news sites:
Wapo: $120/yr Reuters: $45/yr WSJ: $349/yr NYT: $195/yr Bloomberg: $299/yr
That's just a few. Is it better if I just choose one and only get my news from a single site? Or should it really cost thousands of dollars per year to be informed?
Also, with 10x or more value on each reader's copy of the article, say hello to more stringent copyright enforcement (either legally or socially: how dare you replicate the work of this beloved blogger and deprive them of income!). And the complete death of independent search engines.
I just don't see ubiquitous microtransactions leading to anywhere good on a social level. And of course, without a ban on advertising (however that's supposed to work), you'd just end up with sites full of ads on top of microtransactions.
There are plenty of payment mechanisms already used online.
IMO it would be well worth paying for things so I am the customer instead of the product.
Many things could be replaced. My use of FB could be replaced by forums, for example. I would quite happily pay the bills for old style forums that replace the FB groups I admin (although not the costs imposed by the Online Safety Act, but that is a UK only problem).
I'd love to see the internet become relatively non profit, instead of the current for-profit, for absolutely shit model we are living in.
The stocks haven't gone down enough for your liking?
I could see an argument for eliminating targeted advertising. I think everyone gets the same message or none at all.
Being able to precisely target a desired group for a desired outcome seems too powerful and dangerous to exist as it does today.
There is already a concept called surrogate advertising. In India, promoting alcohol products is banned, but companies advertise packaged drinking water instead. Everyone knows what it really represents, yet nothing can be done about it.
We are all guilty, making waves, swamping the spectrum with antagonistic signals that often interfere with each other.
We have too many signals in our society. The resulting noise, the cacophony of lies, are echoed and amplified and evolve into perpetual crosstalk and distortion.
Too many signals transmitting too frequently with too much power.
We can't really outlaw advertising.
But we could limit and license spectrum, like we do with radio frequencies. We could legislate the broadcasting and publication of information, based on that extended simile: regulating 'antenna power' and the airwave spectrum... Holding any broadcaster responsible for the public welfare of their listeners.
We share the infosphere. These channels are theoretically owned by us, the aggregate public. Certainly we are all swimming in the same ocean.
We might want to agree on some boundaries, and even licensing, for broadcasters.
Sure it's a very hard to implement and most probably easy to abuse idea.
However is it impossible? Food for thought.
* the pervasive tracking of data and serving targeted ads without consent.
* the addictive algorithms engineered to keep users engaged in the feedback loop.
* the machinery being used beyond commercial purposes - influencing opinions, manufacturing consent, and sometimes being hijacked by bad actors.
Not to mention the philosophical and psychological implications. What does democracy mean when elections come down to who spent the most on Ads? What's the merit of capitalism if consumers can be brain washed?
Like most here, I have a vendetta against Ad-tech and go to great lengths to keep ads out of my life (i highly recommend opnSense - Blocking ads across the whole home network is pure bliss).
But should they be illegal?
Questions of what constitutes an ad, how to enforce such a rule, and my personal opinion aside: I don't think its inherently wrong for a company to promote their products. I do, however, believe that all of the above points - data tracking, addictive algorithms, non-commercial ads - are bad and should be illegal. Outlawing all of those practices would do a great deal to restoring balance to advertising and the web.
It's the basis for web2 economy just like crypto is the basis for web3 economy, though. So it's hard to make a man admit something when his livelihood depends on it.
Your meal will cost $2.39 less if you watch an advertisement for Irish Spring soap and another for Liberty Mutual insurance. Do you accept these terms?Now I'm thinking of the "neighborhood beautification projects" in Abbey's Monkeywrench Gang though where the guys light up the cutting torches to cut down any billboards that get too close to the Grand Canyon. The fear of course is that police might drive by, since if you think about it the activity itself is really reversing vandalism more than anything else. Apparently today you would have to worry about mobs of concerned citizens tearing you to pieces for taking away their right to be advertised to? I'm so amazed by the very idea of this I can't even get that disgusted or angry about it. What else are these people up to, how do they live and what else do they think? Like, if the best food was determined by ad budgets, do they wonder what to have for dinner ever, and what's the most gourmet cuisine in that world? Best candidate for the election is the one with the biggest ad budget? Channel surfing to get away from the annoying so called "content" that prevent you from seeing ads? I feel a bit like I've discovered alien life or something
Probably one of the hardest new laws we'll ever have to implement.
Let’s define a “good” as something with positive utility and value, and define a “bad” as something that imposes harm or negative externalities. If we treat advertising as a “bad” — not uniformly, but in terms of impact (manipulation, misinformation, psychological harm) — then we can apply Pigovian logic: tax it to reflect its societal cost. This wouldn’t require a blanket ban, just a rebalancing of incentives. Less intrusive or more transparent ads might be taxed less, while high-volume, misleading, or attention-hijacking ones could face heavier levies.
This shares the spirit of the original argument but trades prohibition for systemic correction — more like how we treat pollution or cigarettes. The advantage is that it avoids the free speech trap, acknowledges that not all advertising is equally harmful, and allows markets to adjust.
You don’t need a moral consensus to act — just an agreement to price the harm.
I have thought a lot about this basic idea of “incentivise goods / tax bads” over the years, and even how to do it a way that is revenue neutral to the government (via “feebates”) and advertising is one of the first places I’d try this.
Likelihood of success in the current climate: zero.
https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan....
(I tend to think of the aether in which ads are transmitted as the public, uh, space)
In between you doing that and me thinking on it overnight, I ended up writing up my thoughts as a blog post [0], which I have submitted here to HN as well [1].
[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
[0] Slightly tangentially, to be ignored, until later (after careful reconsideration of doubts raised in your [1]: https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/29610[2])
In particular, to consider how unification of the 2 notions of excludability/rivalry can lead to the 2 actions of subsidies/taxation coalescing (thus going "beyond good & evil")
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43621295
[4] https://www.econlib.org/the-correlation-between-excludabilit...
>Yet in the real world, both excludability and rivalry lie on a continuum.
It's naive to think so. The obvious argument against that is that the behavior of the consumer, not the producer, is what constitutes the problem
you know it's a scam the moment they promise you more than 2% returns.
The customers were happy and I made a profit.
Hard to see advertising as outright bad even though it should probably be more regulated than it is.
“You're Either Growing Or You're Dying.”
Banning or limiting advertising will be hard until that type of thinking changes.
But yes, to me illuminated signs are wasteful to my attention and to environment, so out they would go.
> I spend my time as a creative marketing strategist and technologist, growing public companies and startups.
Sounds like they may know what they are talking about....
What is the steel man for "advertising bad"? Articles like this always take for granted that advertising is harmful, whereas on the contrary I'm starting from a position where advertising is one of the greatest things that has ever happened, enriching us and making our lives far more vibrant and diverse. PS I have never worked on ads and rarely use them for my products, they are just obviously economically beneficial for everyone.
Electoral politics[0], alcohol, tobacco[1], drugs, gambling, unbridled consumerism … for example
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire
[1] https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/throwback-thursday-wh...
The atrocities subsequently committed are on a whole different level though. I think we might agree on this
Is this actually known to be true? And if so, to what degree and for which products, at which point does it tip into simple manipulation of the customer?
Data collection is the big harm right now. Advertising companies have enormous databases on ~any individual's interests, political opinions, gender identity, and much more.
The immediate harm of all this data collection is that, while Google has good security practices, the average webshop or advertising middleman does not, and so data leaks are frequent. Stalkers and harassment groups as well scammers and other fraudsters already use such leaked data. This particular harm is in the here and now.
The big looming threat is: What happens when a government decides to tap into these databases. (Y'know. Like they do in China.)
Because right now, should a government ever want to, it can just call up Google, Facebook, whomever else, and ask: "Give us a list of everyone who meets these criteria".
This completely trivializes any kind of large scale oppression of the people. Pre-compiled lists of almost every political dissenter, with verticals across almost every topic imaginable.
It's no hypothetical either. During WWII, the Nazis seized civil registry records in order identify and kill people as part of the holocaust. There's no reason why any future authoritarian government won't do the same to the big ad-tech databases.
---
For something in a lighter mood: The one general problem about advertising is that it's an industry prone to quite a lot of fraud. There's an inherent information asymmetry in that advertising agencies have a near-monopoly on not only the performance data, but also how it's gathered.
How many impressions did a video get? Only Facebook knows. What's an impression? Only Facebook knows. And why would they ever be honest about those two things to you, the advertising buyer?
As you pointed out, very simple registries are already more than sufficient for government oppression. Detailed data that Facebook collects, like which brand of dog food you prefer, is neither necessary or even helpful for government oppression. The ads data is not even 1% as useful to them as things like telephone records, which the telephone companies will happily send as required by law
> One micro payment later I have a list of links and reviews
You won't get on those lists nor will you get any reviews without marketing and promotion.
Going to a conference to promote your product to participants..
Do you allow the shills to shill?
Well, shills gonna shill— I sure wish I promoted my businesses more. It is uncomfortable at times but that’s not really a good excuse to not promote what you know to be good.
No, I don't think we need to argue about where the line between the two is.
And, honestly, how do you know? I don’t think it is clear that all cars are fair game for all ads, nor that all billboards should be banned. We might not need a line, but we need criteria for value
Get it on a ballot measure.
20% discount or tv ads are a form of advertising, easy to spot. What about sponsored content ?
It's already trickier to detect, and even then there are sponsored content where someone is paid to showcase, review or straight up lie about a product quality.
If I make a great job with a customer and I tell him, make everyone you know aware how great I am. That's also a form of advertising.
Just being myself is advertising for myself, if I'm good at something, I can take part in a talent tv show and purposely avetise my skills to tv viewer.
Surveillance is much worse, and banning it also solves the worst aspects of advertising.
It's very dumb.
I don't know what that has to do with taxing marketing spend.
That depends on where you are in the world.
If you are referring to lack of personal income tax deductions in your local tax code, I don't know where you live, but they are quite common.
If you give me extra wishes, I’d love three options, to either say that the ad is annoying, the brand isn’t for me, or I don’t want to be offered that type of product.
The quality of ads would skyrocket if I could just stop seeing efforts to get me to be interested in things that I will never buy.
Just before joining Facebook, I was living abroad and confronted to ads in a language I didn’t understand constantly. As my bootcamp task, I measured that this was 4% of ads shown to users. At the time, this was already billions of dollars. My manager deemed that to be a ridiculous and pointless exercise. One night at the bar (there were three bars in the London office at the time), I mentioned it to a guy who happened to be the big ad boss, who immediately prioritized the project, I got a couple of smart guys who joined after I was promoted for finding this.
A bit later, I checked the conversion rate by how many times you’ve seen the same ad before. It was a precipitous cliff: people click on things they’ve never seen before. Ranking ads from the same advertiser happens to be one of those SQL/Hive query that doesn’t scale well, so I had to use the fact I came to the office early and has 12 hours of uninterrupted server time before the daily queries were hammering anything, and I had to sample a lot—but I realized I could sample by server, which helped a lot.
I tried to mention it to the same guy, who said he knew about that problem, but empowering users like I suggested would not work: it would shrink the matching opportunities, AI was getting smarter, etc. In practice, the debate around privacy got very toxic, and Facebook couldn’t let people do that without some drama about storing a list of advertisers that they said they didn’t like.
One of Sandberg’s trusted lieutenants lost a child late in her pregnancy; it was a whole thing. She started seeing ads for baby clothes just after, which triggered an optional ban on alcohol, gambling, and baby stuff. That’s still there. I worked with her briefly a bit later (after months of bereavement) and asked if it made sense to expand the category. She replied that those were two legal obligations, plus her well-known personal drama that no one dared push against, so she was able to push for those three, but that the company had changed. No other categories could be added: at that point, it would be too difficult. Mark used to not care about ads, but he started having expensive ideas, notably AI (to ban horrendous content); he needed the money, and he started to care about raking as much dough in as possible. I had worked on horrendous content (instead of ad language) enough to know that it mattered, so I was very conflicted. It felt surreal how much things had changed in nine months.
All that still feels like a giant waste, not the least how much energy goes into making and showing ads to people repeatedly swearing at their screen, begging to make that annoying copy disappear.
A panel of randomly selected 100 people will be the judge and jury.
No more billboards, no more ads on TV or radio or podcasts or when you're on a plane or when you're in an Uber and they have that screen. No more ads in something you've already paid for a la newspapers.
You want to advertise to, say, all the people in Arkansas? You have to pay them directly to post your ad on Arkansas USList. Want to target further? Great, you have to pay the county to post on their board. Then, people that want to see your ads can go to their local board, filter by their interests, and maybe see your ad. Want to target all the electricians in a county? Their union runs a board and you can pay them.
Cities/counties/states/${localeType}s could opt to, say, issue an advertising dividend to their residents.
My definition of advertising is the unwanted stealing of your attention by someone who wants you to buy something. Or be aware of something you could buy. It takes you out of a context you have put yourself in, stealing your attention (and therefore your time, which is all we really have in this life).
My stupid USList idea flips this on its head by making it possible to only see ads when you want to.
Movie trailers when you're at the cinema are ads, sure. But they are ads that fit the context you've put yourself in. If you're at the theater, it makes sense for the playbill to list other shows. If you're at a restaurant, the list of specials, or a wine recommended by your server are both appropriate. Even a list of specials or deals in the window of a restaurant, as long as it isn't 100x100ft and illuminaated, is fine by me.
But an LED billboard distracting you with a 2-for-1 meal deal as you drive down the freeway is out of your context (and dangerous! and needlessly polluting!) When we consider the tracking and spying that has become possible thanks to online advertising companies like Google, Facebook, etc... it's scary. And entirely needless.
Like I said, I've been noodling on this for a while and am definitely the crazy anti-advertising guy in my circles. But once I point out the prevalence of ads and how it's like being kicked in the knees all day, I've found people seem to start getting it. I've done more than a few pihole + wireguard installs, UBlock origin + Sponsorblock installs, etc.
Fuck ads.
Like, only Company A (who completely coincidentally contributed to my political campaign) is allowed to advertise inside the political boundaries I control?
For instance, for false claims, make it easier to drag a corporation into court and get legal remedies commensurate with the damage or potential damage caused by their dishonesty.
Right now the bias is towards unfettered, dishonest and psychologically manipulative commercial "free speech" with no guardrails the average person can enforce.
So, saying "we think this is the best detergent ever" is fine. It's clearly an opinion. But false or generally misleading claims, especially those that cover-up the potential dangers of the product, could lead to punitive damages sufficient to be a deterrent.
Feels similar to a point in a larger rant about bloated page sizes:
https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
"I think we need to ban third-party tracking, and third party ad targeting.
Ads would become dumb again, and be served from the website they appear on.
Accepted practice today is for ad space to be auctioned at page load time. The actual ads (along with all their javascript surveillance infrastructure) are pulled in by the browser after the content elements are in place.
In terms of user experience, this is like a salesman arriving at a party after it has already started, demanding that the music be turned off, and setting up their little Tupperware table stand to harass your guests. It ruins the vibe."
The really tough part is classifying "what counts as an ad". Of course the ones shown by Facebook and Google are ads, but let's look at some not-so-straightforward examples:
1. The community centre in my neighbourhood has a wall with lots of ads from local groups. Language practice groups (which are free), language lessons (paid), narcotics anonymous, painting classes, and a lot of other services provided by individuals or small groups. Some of them non-profit, some of them are the main source of income for those providing the service. I deliberately approached this wall looking for those ads, and we need them for this kind of groups to survive.
2. A supermarket places a large banner near the entrance with this week's offers. The products on offer are expiring soon. There's an interest in selling the goods so they are consumed and don't go bad. The interest isn't only on the supermarket's behalf: as a society, we want to minimise the amount of food that goes to waste.
3. How do we buy and sell houses if there are no ads for "houses on sale". I am aware that there are economic models where individuals don't need to buy and sell houses, but switching to such a model seems way beyond the scope of the proposal. Is an ad stuck to the window still allowed?
4. iOS shows "suggestions" in the order of "sign up for cloud storage to store my data because your phone is full". I consider this an ad. Can we write legislation which would catalogue this as an ad without false positives?
___
I've felt the same way. Some thoughts I had while reading:
> Propaganda is advertising for the state, and advertising is propaganda for the private. Same thing.
Rare to see someone else recognize this. Not all propaganda is malicious; all systematic spreading of ideas aimed at promoting a cause or influencing opinions is propaganda.
> Think about what's happened since 2016: Populists exploit ad marketplaces
This feels like calling out conservatives. Ironically, it's through relentless propaganda over a century that progressivism has become ascendant. We're reminded 24/7 from every mainstream institution, that what has historically been radically unpopular is ACTUALLY "normal" and "respectable". Indeed, it's only through such incessant propaganda that overwhelmingly unpopular trends have been able to take hold.
> what poisons our democracy is a liberating act in itself. An action against that blurry, “out-of-focus fascism”
What poisons our republic is progressives forgetting that they're ascendant and how they got there.
So many apps I use are supported by 30-60s ads for some stupid fucking mobile game that I immediately know I don't want to install, I have no intention to interact with the ad and yet I'm forced to sit through it for 30s, only to hit the X on it and have it open the Play Store anyway?!?!
And video ads in general, if I know that I'm not interested right away, why am I forced to sit through 30-60s of it?
I mean I can look away from a fucking billboard...but this stuff. A great first step would be to make ads that forcibly hold attention like that illegal.
If advertising is a zero-sum game between companies competing for your eyeball-minutes, allocating double digits of their income to marketing departments, it’s a net drain on the economy. If it’s a positive-sum game for companies and you are purchasing more goods than you otherwise would because of the ads you see, it means you are purchasing stuff you don’t need, and it means advertising is a way to funnel your money to companies through nonconsensual means, i.e theft. In reality it’s a slightly positive sum game for companies.
Advertising is cancerous in the sense that if there was no advertising, nobody needs to advertise, but if somebody is advertising and you are not, then you’ll lose market share and die, so you advertise too and hence it spreads. It is parasitic in the sense that vast amounts of collective resources of society is spent on this redirecting-money-from-company-A-to-company-B scheme with no positive value generated.
Political advertising undermines democracy. Ads have a huge influence on the outcome of modern elections. You need billionaires backing you to fund your campaign, and guess what? Those billionaires will have some special requests when you take the seat. Fair elections and leaders caring for the people are only possible in a world without political advertising.
All arguments in favor of advertising are circular, they presume the current economy/society where everything is heavily dependent on advertising and then point out “Look, but X wouldn’t work without advertising!” In reality a world without advertising would look much different, and my hunch is it would be wealthier and with less inequality, too.
Is it advertising if you say it in conversation? What about on your blog?
If we - as in humanity - are still there in 500 to 1000 years, advertisement may be taught in a history class as one of the barbaric practices of the 21th century. Maybe some scholars will be able to relate it to world hunger, climate change and genocide with a mathematical precision that we are not yet capable of. That is a timeline I love to think about.
Of course, slaving away in the asteroid mines for Bezos inc., looking at hyper sexualized ads for a trip to Mars is equally likely.
Advertising can be useful (to find out about stuff) but very disingenuous (because people can lie). What I would very much like is to be able to assess the trustworthiness and similarity of people advertising me stuff. If someone likes same things as me and I never find him to "lie" (whatever my personal interpretation of that is) I should give him more trust. If someone picks things that I am not interested in and I think he favors stuff (because he is paid, for example) I should give him less trust. Then when I look for a product/video/restaurant I should see things recommended by people I trust more.
I know this kind of happens with "stars", "vloggers" and so on but lacking a system where you track it, means that it is easier to get complex to separate who is just "fun" and you watch but you know he lies and who is also "trustworthy" and you know you can also take his recommendations into account.
But that's just one idea, maybe there are others out there...
Let's face it, it is incredibly simple to entirely avoid ads everywhere online. Vivaldi or Brave will block all ads (Brave even does it in YouTube) so just install those in 2 taps and you're set.
Many online communities and first party sites are free because they are paid for/motivated by ad income though
Sure there are many sites that don't have ads and are done truly as a passion project by the owner(s) but many rely on the income to pay for bandwidth and hosting etc, or even staff costs. Would Reddit et al exist without any source of income?
People say "I'd pay to use foo without ads!" Yet when those options are available, and when it comes to putting your money where your mouth is, turns out that actually most people don't want to pay to access foo without ads (think YouTube, think Facebook etc that have ad free tiers that hardly anyone pays for). People just block the ads and keep using it for free and so the site gets neither ad revenue nor subscription revenue.
Digital content is published by placing data on a computer, connecting that computer to the intent, then running software on that computer that allows software on other computers to connect to it and download that content.
Attempting to ban ads is an attempt to censor the content of that communication. It’s analogous to attempting to ban the things people can say over telephone calls. It would be a clear violation of the 1st Amendment.
The Author’s points about “Dopamine Megaphones” and “tracking” don’t hold up.
Posting something online is not the same as yelling through a megaphone. And restrictions on tracking are about behavior, not speech.
One can outlaw both of those things without unreasonably restricting speech.
But banning ads is absolutely unreasonable restraint of free speech rights.
If I speak on the telephone, I am allowed to hand the phone to someone else for a moment and let them speak. Banning such a thing would be unconstitutional.
Many online ads work in the same way.
Similarly, I can take money from someone, and in response speak things they want me to speak. Restraining that is also a violation of free speech rights.
Just because online ads are horrible, doesn’t mean they can be outlawed without trampling on fundamental rights.
So I think more about making internet ads illegal, just to wash out all the spying filth from it. Alphabet, meta, parts of amazon, etc. They are natural cancer and prone to propaganda attacks because it's the same thing.
As per entertainment, people will find the way. Kids these days may not know, but nothing has as much energy as a bored teen/20+ ager. We formed physically local groups based on interests and had life that wasn't 99% passive peering into the screen.
Or is that just helpfully letting us know of something related that we might want ;)
We’d probably have more underground free papers with clever writing, littered with tons ads in them, circulating around in the black market.
But there would likely also be a lot of bad “telephone,” literal word of mouth, but the message might get lost, turning into disinformation.
On the other hand, there could be organized, sanctioned markets where you’re allowed to hock wares and show off product catalogs.
Only to authoritarians who think banning things is the solution to everything.
This is the typical "common sense Genius notion" that hasn't been thought out one bit.
This person doesn't care for democracy. They are zealots and ignore the fact that:
- marketing is communication to achieve a goal (reaching a potential customer about the value of a service) and is a legal way for companies to compete. If they can't do marketing legally they'll do it illegally and/or compete with violence. - discoverability is necessary and if you didn't have any means to discover stuff it would be insane or worse, absolutely dictated by this "democracy lover" who wants to have total control for "the greater good".
I don't like ads one bit and absolutely welcome regulation (which is hard because whether you outlaw something or not, the money will be there, see alcohol and prohibition) but this is just so self congratulating and obtuse that it's hard to take it seriously.
All the talk about propaganda or fascism and laughing at the concept of free speech tells me this is yet again, one of these "my blue party lost the elections and I blame propaganda and ads" and that they haven't even given it a second thought beyond "I get clicks" because they don't explain how they propose making sure communication doesn't hide advertising in it. Articles like hers advertise her blog, posting it here is advertising. Making any sort of argument about X being better is an advertisement for X.
It's like people want to play scenarios in their head and refuse to think about economics and game theory because the reality is they want to shape the world politically to their will. Authoritanism hidden with "good feels".
No thank you. You're far more dangerousn than ads.
You don’t make a planet of 8 billion people work without the trappings of civilization, good and bad. You certainly don’t make it work without commerce and freedom of speech.
I am currently selling my house. He's basically saying this would become impossible. This whole post has some real im14andthisisdeep energy.
>Algorithm-driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok that harvest and monetize attention, destroying youth, would lose their economic foundation.
I guess the author has never been on HN.
This simply assumes Instagram would no longer function because of zero ad placement dollars. I guess the author doesn't know how KOLs works in product launch and promotion.
I get a lot of stick every time I had to say this, but a lot of people in tech, has a very simplistic view that all ads are evil without understanding how ad works in the first place. Especially beyond digital ad. And to make matter worst any discussions about Ad's argument has been downvoted in the past 10-12 years. Some of the questions which toomim purpose would be instantly dropped. I guess the vibe shift is real.
But if there is one type of ad we should ban. It would be political ads. A candidate's legitimacy should not be partly dependent on amount of ad money you throw at it.
It is the root cause of many modern issues and _something_ definitely needs to be done about it. It even erodes capitalism itself by making consumers the product, which has been known for a while but the generalization seems non-obvious - that this happens every time when to the producer-consumer relationship is introduced a third party that changes the financials incentives of producers.
I probably wouldn't go as far as making advertising completely illegal but I'd like to see it regulated and probably limited to spaces specifically made to be "advertising hubs" both online and in the physical world.
Do we need a way to connect suppliers with consumers? Yes. Do we need an intermediary that acts in bad faith? No we do not.
I would propose the crazy idea that such intermediaries should be at least equally responsible to the consumers as the suppliers.
That would be helpful.
The interesting question is whether we're happy with where the dial is right now, which direction we want to push it, and how fast --- and the underlying meaning of the article is that maybe we should be pushing it in the regulatory direction very fast indeed.
> Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you "GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY" with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment.
The same argument could be applied to the homeless people I see on most corners these days with cardboard signs designed to pull my heart strings. It's a different brain chemical, but it's actually real and it affects my re-uptake inhibitors a lot more. Should we ban them? Or just their signs?
Here are a few of the many defenses against advertising that are all free:
- Ad blockers for browsers
- Kill your television
- Listen to and support public media (unless those sponsorship messages count as ads which is a valid argument)
If literally everybody applied just those three things, advertising would die a natural death without having to ban anything.
<rant>
I'm a bit of a free speech zealot, and so I'll pull the slippery slope fallacy and just ask: after ads, what do we ban next? Sponsorship messages like public radio uses? Product placement in movies? Would we be allowed to have _any_ real products in movies or would everybody drink Slurm instead of Coke and drive around in Edisons instead of Teslas? Are movie previews allowed? What about product reviews where the product is given to the reviewer for free? What about Simone's presence on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert years ago? That was entertainment, but it also clearly advertised her YouTube channel. Is that allowed?
</rant>
We humans are one of the few animals that have within us multiple ways to kill ourselves. While that's mostly thanks to our awesome thumbs, our speech is another powerful tool. We're also one of the few animals that can, with much work, transcend our weaknesses and be more than the goop that makes us up. Finding out whether we do is the whole reason I'm sticking around.
Capitalism depends on advertising to let people know of the product or service that is more cost effective than existing solutions. The advertising budget is dependent on knowing your product is actually good enough to justify the expense. Without advertising, competition itself doesn't work.
In this way we can eliminate manipulative marketing and rely purely on quality.
Should parents even be allowed to name children or should the state choose a descriptive name based on their appearance and behaviour? Hard to tell but I think we need to think long and hard about manipulative naming in more than just the corporate sphere.
For example, run an ad campaign on Google, figure out your CPC (cost per customer). See if that is even below your LTV (lifetime value per customer) plus operating expenses. And then tweak all the variables in your product and campaign to actually create some sort of sustainable business flywheel.
Having an amazing product and 'waiting' for your network to spread the word to all potential customers.. it's absurd to think that would work. It's hard enough even with big ad campaigns to reach potential customers.
I don't agree. It should depend on whether such a mention leads to promotion of the product. We are not barbarians to limit freedom of speech.
After any mention of a product by its user, a court should be held to decide whether this mention was advertising. Because even though the user received a benefit from purchasing the product from the company (otherwise he would not have bought it and would not have become a user), advertising also implies promotion, so the court must first determine whether this mention was made in such a way that it could potentially induce the purchase of the product by other people, and only then close the company.
And it doesn't even have to be a mention. Advertising is really mean, like a couple of days ago my girlfriend ate a pudding right in front of me. And it was the last pudding, and she ate it so well that I wanted one too. And you'll never guess what I bought at the store today! Yes, that same pudding. Unfortunately, we are vulnerable to advertising even when we are fully aware of its destructive nature.
- the difference between zero-sum and positive-sum games
- that large parts of society are engaged in zero- (or even negative-) sum games 1) some through choice or 2) because they are forced to, to be able to compete with group 1)
Advertising, manipulation, misinformation, disinformation, and lying are all related phenomena with negative effects on both individuals and society.
Just like Wales is the first place to propose punishing lying, at least from some positions of power, I am looking forward to whatever country becoming the first to make advertising illegal, at least in some forms and scales.
Thinking from a small business perspective, advertising is the only way to find consumers if you are just getting started.
Business stop advertising. Sales drop. People lose job.
(edit: I have actually been thinking in similar terms as the article, but I do think the article is optimistic and utopian, as if a good intuition would be enough to prevent the very same forces from exploring the reform
Filtering visitors by fingerprint of the browser (cloud flare and palemoon) won't stop bots, but creates a market for more sophisticated bots)
With so much fake news and data, a lot of content has started to seem like white noise. Maybe this is a direction worth exploring for us as a society.
I’m as anti-advertising as they come and this is too far. There needs to be a more reasoned approach. Banning tv ads, or billboards, or online advertising, or certain practices - fine. A blanket ad ban would do far more harm than good.
Banning ads altogether wouldn't automatically eliminate incentives for manipulative or addictive content—platforms would quickly shift toward subscriptions, paywalls, or other revenue streams. While this shift might alter harmful dynamics somewhat, it wouldn't necessarily remove them altogether. For instance, subscription models have their own perverse incentives and potential inequalities.
Moreover, completely removing ads would disproportionately hurt small businesses, non-profits, and public service campaigns that rely on legitimate, non-invasive ads to reach their audiences effectively.
Instead of outright banning ads—an overly blunt measure—we'd likely achieve far better outcomes through thoughtful regulation targeting the actual harmful practices: invasive tracking, dark patterns, algorithmic manipulation, and lack of transparency. A better approach would aim at reforming advertising at its source, protecting individual privacy and autonomy without crippling a large segment of legitimate communication.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/04/05/The-CoSoc...
I've been on the internet for over 25 years and there wasn't a time in which ads were more than a mild annoyance. Sure, a 5-second ad before watching a video, or a porn ad in The Pirate Bay, or an ad in a news site - I could do without them. But it's a nothingburger, and I'm grateful for those ads, as many of the sites I use would not exist without them. For anyone who's really bothered by them, there are ad blockers.
Furthermore, user data and tracking is a huge bogeyman, and it's extremely overblown. I'm yet to see any evidence of anyone having any relevant data about me AT ALL. With any luck they can profile me in that I use certain sites, or that I'm a male in my 30s and I live in X country. Generic shit at best. Relevant read: https://archive.is/kTkom
If anything, so-called targeted ads have been failing on me because I'm never suggested producs or services I'd actually buy.
So, what's the issue here? For all the issues we currently have, ADS are the worse? No.
What I think is:
a) This is an elitist in-group "luxury belief". It's like saying I hate ads signals a sort of superiority, as if you're part of people in the know, and ads are for normies or NPCs. That's for inferior people, I'm above that.
b) This is a problem for people in the autist spectrum, in which those who say they hate ads are overrepresented.
But I think there's a darker undercurrent since this view has been lobbyied and astroturfed to oblivion:
c) This is a propaganda effort to distract you from more nefarious things, or to encourage them. Such as normalizing banning and prohibiting things. Normalizing strict state-enforced regulation of the internet.
And you hate paywalls
And you don't subscribe to newsletters
And you don't buy merch
And you don't donate $5 to Wikipedia
And you haven't bought Winrar
And you think copyright should be illegal
But maybe you should consider the second order effects
The author is off their chair. Yes, even commercial speech is protected as long as it’s not fraudulent. And there are already laws prohibiting nuisances. Advertising isn’t a nuisance in any legal sense; it just comes along with the ride when you willingly consume sponsored media.
Listen to and watch only public media, and stop going to sponsored websites and using social media if you want to avoid advertising. It isn’t the most convenient thing, but it’s not impossible.
If you disagree with this comment, please respond instead of downvoting. Don’t be a coward.
if you disagree with the tribe, you will be punished by the tribe. Some of the tribe can down vote you and so they will use this terrible power to silence anyone who might shake tribes life view :)
https://genius.com/Minutemen-shit-from-an-old-notebook-lyric...
The spyware and bunch of blatant lies part?
Or the new product discovery part?
Is everyone forgetting there's a middle ground?
First, it is 100% free speech.
Second, the government isn't allowed to make laws prohibiting the exercise of free speech based on the content of said speech. Nor can it take actions which are arbitrary or capricious.
Third, restrictions on free speech MUST fulfill some overriding public good like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater or words meant to incite violence. Slander, libel, &etc.
Fourth, why is it even necessary to explain this?
It's speech for sure.
> Second, the government isn't allowed to make laws prohibiting the exercise of free speech based on the content of said speech. Nor can it take actions which are arbitrary or capricious.
Except that they can and do, as you outline below. All laws are arbitrary.
> Third, restrictions on free speech MUST fulfill some overriding public good like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater or words meant to incite violence. Slander, libel, &etc.
Firstly, the fire thing is a myth. Secondly, so we're just quibbling on "overriding" then?
> Fourth, why is it even necessary to explain this?
Well because none of your points are that conclusive?
The third rule follows from the second, the government isn't allowed to curtail speech except under extraordinary circumstances which has been whittled down to basically "panic and disorder" and "fighting words". The other two are civil torts if I'm not mistaken, you can't be arrested for slander or libel. There's others but they are extremely limited.
> Firstly, the fire thing is a myth.
Go spread panic and see how fast you get charged with disorderly conduct or whatever the equivalent local statute is. Bonus points if someone is harmed by your actions.
> Secondly, so we're just quibbling on "overriding" then?
No, the Supreme Court has some pretty hard and fast rules on this.
By the laws that people write which the article proposes to change.
The other exceptions are, literally, extremely limited to things which hold no legitimate public value like child pornography. If you can name only one legitimate instance of advertising then they are, by definition, proposing a content based prohibition of speech -- they don't like what these advertisers say while those other ones are fine because of whatever reasons.
They can change the laws but the courts place the burden on the government to prove that the problem can't be solved by any lesser means. And when they say "any" they really do mean "any", the problem can't be solved without making the targeted speech illegal.
Sure you can, you just have to alter one big law.
Now, on the other hand, the Supreme Court can also chose to ignore a couple centuries of case law and effect the same goal but that's also less likely than changing the constitution.
Let's take advertising out of it, what are the chances we would even be seriously discussing this issue if TFA was proposing to outlaw an entire religion?
Good point. It’s specifically paid speech that’s the problem.
Apparently there was a "significant public health crisis associated with tobacco use" according to the google.
I'm not even sure they're universally banned, I don't pay that much attention but seem to recall still seeing them in the windows of gas stations and whatnot.
Particularly good advertisement in society is a cultural trait that makes it consume way more than it needs, driving individuals into debt, but that means way more business activity to capture that and then redirect all that human effort into actual power.
Butan has no advertisements and people consider themselves quite happy, but the second China or India decide they want something from it, there is nothing it can actually do.
Kinda like in the novel “the dispossessed” from Le Guin - the anarchist planet ultimately lives at the mercy of the capitalist one, and if policy changes (for example - Trump) then you are … no more.
So while I agree that ads are an unnecessary tax that should be banned, I can imagine a society that does could end up at the mercy of a society that doesn’t, given a generation or two.
In Australia, liquor ads were banned on sports jerseys and stadiums, tv (i think) and so on. But now we have this ridiculous Orwellian environment where literally every jersey is plastered with an online betting platform, online and tv advertising for these same (addictive) platforms. Each ad is suffixed with a tiny disclaimer that "gambling destroys lives/gamble responsibly". Fucking please....
I used to work in advertising. One thing is clear, the biggest advertisers have insane amounts of money to throw around. It doesnt have to be effective, all it has to do is repeat itself, everywhere at all times.
Advertising is very closely linked to oversupply of products we dont need. Governments are to be very clear not in existence to safeguard the public from anything. If they were, the law would penalise large producers for planned obscelesence, poor quality products designed to break, which in turn requires incessant advertising to keep the machine moving.
What I absolutely have issues with is targeted advertising, having to modify content to make it advertiser friendly (i.e. reasonable people on YouTube having to avoid swearing/use infuriating euphemisms for self harm or suicide etc in case it makes the video not advertiser friendly), and the frankly offensive and unjustifiable amount of tracking that goes along with it.
I wish we could ban dynamic advertising (can't think of a better term, as in targeted, tailored advertising that is aware of what it's being advertised against) and just allow static advertising.
I also wish it could be codified in law that what is shown to me on my computer is entirely up to me, and if I want to block advertising on my computer, that is my choice, in the same way I can make a cup of tea during the ad breaks in tv, and skip over the advert pages on the paper.
...
> But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
Humanity had hatred and insular bubbles a millennia ago just fine without advertisements. There was genocides and wars before the current form of ads ever emerged. It's a shame that so many people think that changing a financial policy is all that is needed to change an ingrained human behavior.
If I go play chess against a rando at a park and lose, your above argument makes sense.
If I go play chess against someone who spent 150,000 man years studying how to beat me, to say 'well, it was all up to your mental strength, same as it's always been forever, and you just weren't strong enough' is BS.
Edit: The amount of focused research, science, practice, experience in manipulation humans is unprecedented. Never before have millions to tens of millions of human years been dedicated to things in such a continuous, scientifically approached way. Yet we act as if the world is basically the same as 1980 except we have smart phones/the internet.
Why this is happening is beyond simple if you follow the money. Compare the Ad industry today compared to the 90s, how is the ad industry able to outcompete every advertising venue thereafter? Its clear in hindsight that there were companies that had constraints, and there were companies that didn't, and this wasn't a matter of competition either.
The main difference if you dig into the details is you will find that the money being pumped into advertising seemingly endlessly without constraint comes from surveillance capitalism, in other words the money is subsidized by the government and the US taxpayer, through a complicated money laundering scheme. What was once called advertising in the 90s isn't what we have today. This shouldn't be possible, except in cases of money printing, and they all end badly for the survivors.
Banks engage in money printing through debt issuance to collect 3 times on the amount loaned. They loan out money they don't have, the principle of which must be repaid. They get paid a required interest on that amount which includes the interest double dipping and compounding. Finally the balance sheet gets into arrears so far to the point where they require a bailout usually once every 8-10 years. A bailout is required to balance the ledgers before default and its paid by debasement of the currency, without it you get a Great Depression where the credit providing facilities have all been burned to the ground like what Pres Coolidge did through inaction and lack of regulation.
Legitimate market entities are producers that are bound by a loss function relative to their revenue. State-run apparatus have suckled up for their share to a money printer entity, growing like a cancer since the 70s, and will continue to do so long as the slaves feeding it can continue, and that is based upon producers capable of producing at a profit (self-referentially).
Legitimate producers cease operation and accept a buyout or close down when they can no longer make a profit. This naturally occurs when the currency ceases having a stable store of value as a monetary property. The money printer apparatus are not exempt from this requirement either, and you have growing corruption and sustaining shortage when purchasing power fails, which collapse to deflationary pressure.
The slaves in this case are anyone that transacts in the medium of exchange/currency. History covers this quite extensively as it happens in runaway fiat every single time given a sufficient time horizon.
When do producers have to cut their losses and cease production? With the currency, the point where money cannot ever be paid back is that point. The same as any stage 3 ponzi, where outflows exceed inflows.
If the GDP > debt growth, smart business will cease public exchange and operations. All other business will be bled dry by the money printers. You get collapse to non-market socialism, which has stochastic dynamics of chaos as an unsolveable hysteresis problem based on lagging indicators. The results of which include sustaining shortage (artificial supply constraint), to deflation, famine, death, and socio-economic collapse. Workers that are not compensated appropriately (and they can't be) will simply stop working. Letting it all rot.
The time value of labor going to zero also causes these same things. That is what AI does.
Without exception, every slave eventually revolts, or ends their and/or their children's existence as a mercy against suffering in the grand scheme.
What makes anyone think AI accidentally achieving sentience won't do something like that when biological systems in the wild favor this over alternative outcomes, in this thing we call history ?
This was extremely ineffective society - because in such system people don't have any real motivation to grow and to become better.
And this leads to society of fools - when in 1990s borders opened, many scammers from all the world, made fortunes on fooling people, who just used to sterile environment without even weak manipulation, so totally defenseless for really serious scam.
Unfortunately such environment now, after 30 post-soviet years have extremely problems with economy.
Imagine, we in Ukraine have thousands engineers unemployed, or working for less than general laborer.
You may wonder, how this could happen. Answer - information inequality - engineer or any other professional know at least few times more than ordinary people (or from other specialty).
Why information inequality is so important - because even in USSR, where govt tried to make totally controlled "planning" economy, have about million products on market, so to optimize production need to solve system of equations 1Mx1M size, which is even now semi-possible.
In free market environment, complex of mechanisms "invisible hand of market", advertisement+entrepreneurs as intermediators+mechanisms of reputation, making market semi-optimal, so in real world have about 30% resources spend ineffective.
But when soviet govt claimed to make 100% effectiveness, in reality, was about 300% ineffective spending, and that's why USSR fail - just because was ineffective. This have many causes - first I already said - people was not motivated to grow anything; from lack of motivation appeared technical weakness - unmotivated people don't invent new things and not eager to adopt abroad technologies (because this also need lot of hard work); tech weakness leads to lack of modern computing infrastructure, so when USSR government dreamed about modern computers, could have only outdated hardware, steal from West (or got via grey-black schemes which is just other name of steal).
And after USSR fail, several directors of huge soviet enterprises, used scam schemes to become private owners of these enterprises, and now they brake reforms, to save their fortunes and power. And for small business need more than 10 years to gather so much resources and reputation, to become enough powerful to run reforms. So many exUSSR countries stuck in between totalitarian and democracy (in reality I see slow motion, but seen next fact in many cases impossible to say, if it is positive or negative, or just nothing significant), and nobody could predict, how many years will spent in this extremely slow motion (or I prefer to name it hang in the air).
So, if we made advertising illegal, huge enterprises will got huge advantage over small business, and will disappear concurrency, so richest people will become rich forever and poorest people will become poor forever.
And must admit, I sometimes don't like advertisement, but it is required by market, so we need to invent some other measures to make advertisement more ethical.
Our right to free speech is not granted by anyone's consent or by government decree. It preexists the state and cannot be taken away.
We hold this truth to be self-evident. We are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights.
If any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.
At some point the public interest overrides an absolute freedom of speech. We can debate where that line is, but "it's not open for discussion" is objectively incorrect.
This is inherently a subjective matter. It's not possible to be objectively incorrect on whether or not speech protection should be absolute.
You have an extremist point of view that your right to free speech is granted to you by the government.
You can wax poetically all you want about endowment by the creator, but try saying racial slurs on daytime TV and see how long that lasts.
Advertisement is just another form of speech that can be limited.
You're conflating two senses of "free speech". Free speech is an ideal, which our society does not fully reach (as you correctly pointed out). But in the US, "free speech" is also sometimes used to refer to the legal protection from the first amendment. And in your example, that does apply. I can say all the racial slurs I want on TV, and it would be quite illegal to put me in jail for it.
This is not true.
Under 18 U.S.C. Section 1464, “[w]hoever utters any obscene, indecent, or profane language by means of radio communication shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” Under 18 U.S.C. Section 1468(a), “[w]hoever knowingly utters any obscene language or distributes any obscene matter by means of cable television or subscription services on television, shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than 2 years or by a fine in accordance with this title, or both.” Likewise, under 47 U.S.C. Section 559, “[w]hoever transmits over any cable system any matter which is obscene or otherwise unprotected by the Constitution of the United States shall be fined under Title 18 or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.”
It's a good thing that natural rights are a real thing and not just something you enjoy ranting into your computer about.
One could put it this way: each post to HN doesn't just say whatever its content says; it also contains a metamessage about what kind of place this is. Since we care very much about what kind of place HN is, and will become, we have to care about that.
(Incidentally, flagged responses aren't removed - they remain visible to anyone who turns the 'showdead' setting on in their profile. You're welcome to turn it on, but if you do, please don't forget that you did! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
"Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal, fundamental and inalienable (they cannot be repealed by human laws, though one can forfeit their enjoyment through one's actions, such as by violating someone else's rights). Natural law is the law of natural rights.
Legal rights are those bestowed onto a person by a given legal system (they can be modified, repealed, and restrained by human laws). The concept of positive law is related to the concept of legal rights."
What part of that are you confused by? You are making a brash claim that the writ of the state includes the ability to censor speech.
Your right to free speech is not granted by anyone. It's your natural right. It's not possible to separate this right from a human with a law.
It is not acceptable for a stranger to come up and start shouting at you while you're trying to read, or hold a conversation, do your shopping, or put gas in your car. So why is it somehow acceptable for advertisers to do so? Would you want to pay for a course of instruction, some unknown percentage of which was not instruction, but was actually conducted at the direction of unknown others, who, with no regard or concern for your life, liberty, well-being or happiness were trying to extract wealth from you? Yet that is exactly what happens with much of our media-mediated experience of the world.
I think the underlying changes in the technology of communication have allowed advertising to grow without sufficient thought on whether such expansion was actually a public good. Like license plates - the impact of which changed radically when the government could, thanks to advances in technology, use them to monitor the position of virtually all vehicles over time, instead of being forced to physically look up who owned what vehicle - the explosion of media over the last century has been accompanied by an immense shift in the impact and capability and intrusiveness of advertising. And it's legality needs to be reassessed in that light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
US law is not a natural right and does not grant the right to say anything. You can claim and exercise a perceived natural right to say anything, you just won’t be protected from punishment under US law for saying certain things.
One stark example is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in the United States. This law required that escaped slaves, even if they reached free states, be captured and returned to their owners. It went further by mandating that citizens and law enforcement in free states assist in this process, effectively making it illegal to help runaway slaves. Penalties for non-compliance were harsh—fines and imprisonment loomed over anyone who aided a fugitive.
By today’s standards, this is widely seen as abhorrent because it not only upheld slavery but forced people to actively participate in it, stripping away any moral or legal refuge for those seeking freedom. It’s a glaring relic of a time when human beings were legally treated as property, clashing hard with modern values of liberty and equality.
I’m talking about the First Amendment, which does mention free speech. That’s a law and not a natural right, which you already know since you quoted it above. Additional laws and court decisions have defined what the free speech protections are, and what types of speech are not protected by law.
The important thing to know about free speech in the US is that because it’s a legal right, it comes with legal protections from the government itself.
The important thing to know about natural rights is that they don’t come with any protection whatsoever, because they are not laws or legal rights. Asserting natural rights may come with consequences that include violence, imprisonment, or death. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence was asserting the natural right to start a war against oppressive government, specifically to justify breaking with British colonial rule. If there are no legal rights protecting you, the government is under no obligation to respect your perceived natural rights.
All laws are backed by violence. That's called law enforcement.
Again, try screaming racial slurs on daytime television. You will be met with a fine and/or imprisonment.
I am not a lawyer. I am not a member of congress. I did not write the law. I don't particularly like or agree with those laws. But they exist, and unless I'm mistaken it seems like you're unwilling to acknowledge their existence.
I get the impression that this "natural right" term is intended to preclude inquiry and shut down discussion.
It seems that the only effect this "natural right" term has on sufficiently curious interlocutors (who will not fall for your rhetorical trick) is to signal that you are more stubborn than people who do not use the term.
Any involuntary contract imposed on any individual is axiomatically immoral and unethical, as I've said below. There's no need to use such extreme examples.
(Noting that the extremities of some of those examples are already illegal)
It does highlight, however, that a shared definition of a spectrum of what "advertising" actually means, is the first step towards being able to exploit whatever rules the politicians decide upon.
I’m also realizing this is cultural and symptomatic of the West - get yourself some core ideals and stop falling for clickbait. Sounds simplistic? This is how you sound when you say “just ban it”
Thank god none of you are in charge of anything so all you can do is post here - good.