Another approach with overlapping effects is to make companies extremely liable for misuse or mismanagement of personal information.
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.
I'm extremely skeptical that there's any meaningful reform to be had with liability for misuse. Demonstrating misuse is a substantial legal hurdle that no one is going to litigate in court. Even with severe and proactive enforcement, it'll just incentivize shell companies to act as liability shields.
Europe has perhaps stricter rules on ads, but they're absolutely not banned, at most they're restricted but that just means you'll see different ads, rather than no ads
You're referring to outdoor advertising; the article is talking about something much more fundamental. But of course you would know that if you had read it
Growing up around Seattle, I had never seen any billboard ads on the freeway. I had no idea it was heavily regulated in Washington State! I wish other states would ban them.
In the US advertising is considered a business expense. So we equate it with investing in infrastructure or research, both of which reasonably would be subtracted from your revenue to determine your tax burden.
Payroll taxes are paid into social security as an insurance payment. It is a percentage of what you pay the employee. Some might say that it is part of the employees pay.
I don't know what that has to do with taxing marketing spend.
Sign me up for a monthly internet pass. Shit, bake it into my monthly internet access fee and make it so the service providers then pay back into internet infrastructure. Just like we do for radio and TV.
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.
They've gone down mostly for terrible reasons. I could at least accept lower stock prices for a better internet for me and my kids. Much like housing prices, haha.
I remember fondly the early internet which was full of hobby sites and forums and niche link rings. This was an innocent better time where the internet was full of small scale creativity and sharing and mostly kindness.
The early internet, which I was a part of, and think of fondly, didn't have anywhere near the utility of the modern internet. It was fun to explore, but you couldn't DO much.
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.
There must be a reason someone hasn't invented a browser plugin for microtransactions on the internet?
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.
This is something I explain too. I’d gladly pay maybe 10 cents for IntelliJ but it’s the Pirate Bay otherwise. Just set the pricing appropriately. It costs $0 to make a copy so it’s an infinite margin. Same with most SaaS. About 20 cents per month should be the maximum. Any more than that is gouging.
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”.
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?
This is the great white whale of the internet. A platform for this would clearly be a thing of value, but extremely difficult to do because you need to booststrap a two-sided market in an environment where all the existing established players are incentivized NOT to participate.
Blendle did exactly this, actually. With similar pricing. For many years. It generates very little money but maybe that’s because German/Dutch news isn’t valuable.
At first I scoffed at this idea, but then I had a tangential thought: what keeps me shopping at Amazon or ebay all the time instead of smaller retailers? It's not product quality or selection, that's for sure. It's mostly the friction of signing up for another site, entering my payment and shipping information, adjusting my mail filters, etc. What would really help would be complete automation of this process, where I click "Checkout", my browser goes through its workflow of asking me once if I approve, and a day or two later I get my product. So I guess if you had payment processing built into the user agent then you can have all the micro transactions you want.
The problem with microtransactions is, who defines the minimum unit? Instead of just publishing a $0.25 article, a site could publish a $1.25 five-part series, each part duly ending in its own cliffhanger. And they'll do it as long as enough readers still keep reading it. (It doesn't matter how you'd prefer to read it, it only matters what they can get away with before profits start to decline. And it wouldn't have to be as drastic as this example, it would be a more subtle trend of less information expressed in more words over time.)
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.
> Obviously credit card transaction fees would be a problem,
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.
I am pretty sure that if people had to find away to make things profitable they would.
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).
This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech?
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?
I think it is a good question, but there are some answers. For one thing, it is paid for, though a system set up for the purpose of putting commercial speech on someone else's profit making media.
Many laws do draw lines in areas that are equally difficult. Its a problem, but far from a fatal one.
Think for a moment about what kind of horrible totalitarian system you'd need to be living in for it to be able to jail a waiter just for making a product recommendation. Given the current US administration, how could anyone in their right mind think it's a good idea to give the government that kind of power?
Who said the punishment would be imprisonment? Fine the waiter $5 for every violation. Such a small fine will be orders of magnitude higher than what advertisers pay.
What happens if he doesn't pay the fine? He goes to jail. All laws are enforced with the threat of jail, otherwise nobody would follow them. So not only do you need an all-pervasive surveillance system to identify when a waiter tries to market something, but also a justice system with the power to jail him for doing so.
You’re right! Luckily everyone on HN works in the IT basement, so they can stay blissfully ignorant about how their company ever makes any money from the exquisite code they’re writing…
Many lines are hard to draw but we benefit from trying to draw them. Worrying too much would be bikeshedding
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.
> I say it sounds like their laws are captured by the pachinko industry.
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.
There are two ways of trying to achieving goal. One is to start from big picture, think if we even want to do something, then plan how to go there. Second is to start from technicalities and probably immediately go nowhere.
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.
It’s not speech that needs to be regulated, it’s broadcast (which should not have 1A protections at nearly the same level). Even if a waiter is giving recommendations, those are limited to the people at the table and there is clearly a mutual exchange of value. Broadcast (aka Industrial) advertising is something we accept, but not because it particularly benefits the viewer. It benefits the broadcaster and advertiser and makes the viewer into a product.
And we already regulate actual broadcast on this basis.
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...
> 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.
Uh, what? You say there's no rule and then in the next sentence you talk about a rule.
I said that it violates no rule to include in program material valid tones that will spuriously trigger an ENDEC which receives them, and that it does violate a rule (specifically, a subsection of 47 CFR part 11 that I can't be bothered hunting down just now) to broadcast program material including such tones.
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.
How would this work for a personal blog? Would I need to be careful not to endorse or even talk about companies and products? And if I didn't have to, wouldn't that open the door for advertising masquerading as news or opinion? Genuinely interested in this.
Were you paid to talk about the product? If not, then it’s constitutionally protected speech. If there is any kind of payment, it’s advertising. If it’s advertising, follow the law.
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.
So if a restaurant rents a property to build a really nice looking outdoor dining area, do they have to surround it with walls so people arent convinced by it to dine there?
In the communications industry there are SOME fairly bright definitions:
- 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
...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 money exchanges hands. If you pay someone to distribute flyers, or you pay someone to run ads.
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.
Worth questioning who that benefits the most. It definitely benefits consumers in the sense that they won't be bombarded by advertisements.
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."
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 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.
Sure, but I meant airtight as a point on a spectrum rather than absolute thing. Meaning: you should prefer laws which are both generic and unambiguous.
Can you point to an airtight law regarding speech that exists today - both as written and enforced? I can't.
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.
No. This is called selective enforcement and is the worst thing in the world. It gives the enforcers the option to pick on whoever they want and give a pass to whever they want, as if there were no law at all. There is effectively no law at all, because literally anyone doing anything can be called either guilty or innocent at the whim of the person doing the enforcing, or whoever controls them.
You've just described how laws actually work - but we have created modern judiciary system so that it will tend to produce outcomes considered fair by the majority. Algorithmic enforcement of justice without human deliberation of case-by-case specifics would be worse that the worst horror stories about soulless bureaucracies.
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.
You've just observed the fact that even the least ambiguous and subjective language possible still requires interpretation, not that laws are meant to be ambiguous or subjective.
They literally said that the ambiguity is good because it keeps everyone on their toes because no one knows if they are safe. That's their own words not my invented re-interpretation.
"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.
This has not been an unknown matter of opinion or speculation since the dawn of writing. You are free to think otherwise, but it is only the freedom to be ignorant.
There would be a chilling effect on speech. People would be afraid to speak or be imprisoned for saying the wrong things. North Korea is the only country that bans advertising.
> North Korea is the only country that bans advertising.
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.
Some of us actually go as far as ban billboards, electronic billboards, or even during elections - some counties in Germany limit all kinds of election related propaganda to a few large billboards at the entrance roads, and the rest is kept clean from the bullshit.
They didn't start out banning those ads. Those ads were banned because they were found to be more harmful than they are worth. We've come to realize that much of the ads we're subjected to these days are also harmful, so it's natural for us to want them banned as well.
The free samples are interesting. No one got mad because people offered cheese samples at the grocery store, because they're not forced to eat them. I dread passing by the perfume island when I go shopping because the vendors can be persistent, but IMO that is also not blatant advertising. Offering free samples of perfumes inside magazines also doesn't offend anyone, but that's clearly paid advertising and would be illegal.
In addition to sibling commenters mentioning incentive-side (eg. paid to promote) considerations, I also propose both an "immersion" and/or "consent" component.
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.
I would start with obvious things, like banning distracting blinking advertisement next to roads and go further from there.
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)
That's why it's such a stupid idea. People who want a world without advertising should create a product that will genuinely improve people's lives and be forced to work as a salesman selling that product and experience the practicalities of doing so before drawing lines. I'm not for unsolicited phone calls about my car's warranty during dinner, but advertising is not this universal evil that some make it out to be.
There's a world of difference between announcing the existence of a product to potentially interested demographics, and abusing people's privacy by collecting their personal data in order to build a profile of them so they can be micro-targeted by psychologically manipulative content that is misleading or downright false—oh, and their profile is now in perpetuity exchanged in dark markets, and is also used by private and government agencies for spreading political propaganda, and for feeding them algorithmic content designed to keep them glued to their screens so that they can consume more ads that they have no interest in seeing... And so on, and so forth.
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.
We don't need to go into absurd discussions in order to prevent 99% of the harm that comes from modern advertising.
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.
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
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
> People who sell things need ways to find buyers.
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.
Product catalogs are advertising... The Sears catalog was full of products made by other companies, and Sears paid a ton of money to get those catalogs to as many people as possible
I think the point is that they're opt-in advertising. You didn't pick up a book and find pages from the Sears catalog interspersed with the pages you were trying to read. You picked up the Sears catalog when you were considering a purchase and wanted to see what was available.
When you visit a ad-supported news website, you're opting in too... No one is forcing you to use that website versus it's ad-free subscription alternatives, it's just that most people have decided they'd prefer the former
The difference is that a catalog is advertising that the viewer actually wants to see. Ads on a news site are ads that the viewer merely tolerates because they go with the thing they want to see.
I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is that the catalog is "pull" in the sense that if you decide to keep your catalog, the advertising is inside the catalog, and you have to physically retrieve your catalog and open it to find what you're looking for (when you're looking for it), instead of the "push" method of running advertisements in every news article and on every bus.
>I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is [...]
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.
I wouldn't call a product catalog advertising, unless I'm forced to read it or receive it without asking. Otherwise it's my own choice to read about the products, which clearly isn't advertising.
You forget that people used to get spammed with catalogs, and you could opt-out of them with the postal service because it was such a problem. Receiving too many catalogs or magazines is absolutely a negative form of advertising, even though it is less of an issue today.
When Sears delivered the brand new Sear catelog to my door every year, all nicely wrapped in plastic with shiny images of brand new products, that sure as hell wasn't "pull".
> The current approach of companies pushing their products to everyone is how we got to the mess we are in today.
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.
> So we have some annoying advertising. Small price.
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?
Having lived overseas, the US isn't a "veritable wonderland of consumer choice". There are 5 grocery store chains, for the great majority of the country there is one way to travel: car. At the store (Kroger), I can buy 2 kinds of salt on the shelves. Where is the "veritable choice"? It has been told in the advertising but the reality is very limited.
There are scores of grocery chains in the US, not 5. There are thousands of independent grocery stores. And literally hundreds of salt options, even at Kroger.
Seriously. Even the most basic supermarkets stock like at least 10 different kinds of salt. Iodized, non, kosher, sea, for grinding, packets, in disposable shakers, etc., and often a couple brands, e.g. Morton and Diamond. And a larger supermarket will have pink salt (Himalayan), various fancy sea salts, fleur de sel, flavored salts...
Meh. This scenario does not seem broadly representative of the US to me. I mean, I don't live anywhere exceptional and near me alone there are Food Lion, Harris Teeter, Wegmans, Trader Joes, Aldi, and Whole Foods stores in addition to the grocery sections at Walmart and Target. And if one drives a little further, there are Publix, H-Mart, and several smaller local outfits - Compare, Li Ming's Global Mart, etc.
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.
The "veritable wonderland" is big cities; come visit NYC or LA. Also affluent smaller cities. Elsewhere, it depends. You can reach parts of the consumption cornucopia by accessing sites like Amazon from basically anywhere in the US though.
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.
The appeal of a catalog is to interest a prospective buyer, not the general public. Once you start targeting the general public, you run into the issues the GP has identified.
> 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...
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.
One person's desire for ignorance should not force that on everyone.
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.
> all of our communication channels are corrupted by companies who want to make us buy stuff
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.
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.
> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels
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.
> People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should.
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.
> 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.
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.
I'd happily support that but the harms of advertising go beyond the problems of surveillance capitalism so heavily restricting ads seems like a good idea on its own.
Simply make it illegal to base the choice of what ad to show on any data derived from the person accessing the content. The same content accessed by different people from different locations should have the same ad probability distribution. You can still do old-school targeting by associating static content with certain types of ad a priori, as long as the shown content is independent of the user and not generated from any user data.
The networks themselves wouldn't be banned, but they wouldn't be permitted to endorse or give airtime to a candidate in exchange for money, I'd assume is the idea.
They're not endorsing candidates in exchange for money. They do use their money to run their networks, which they use to promote certain candidates and positions.
Re: "The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising."
What if they are running the story on local ocean tides or soup kitchens? They are doing this to sell more newspapers or more airtime for advertisers.. does this mean there is an "exchange for money" under your rule?
Well, I'd argue that all stories don't fulfill the same purpose, and that such a small story doesn't have enough importance to the broader public for there to be an "exchange for money" of the type I've described.
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.
What if the candidates did it for free? Aren't they already, because the networks are platforming them? Wouldn't the mere fact of showing a candidate be an endorsement in itself?
I mean, if you're going to make up your own First Amendment jurisprudence. But it would be worth reading the line of cases from Schneider through Sorrell (there's a lot of them) to get the reasoning of several generations of jurists on why it's not this simple.
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].
Commercial speech is also widely recognized to have lesser First Amendment protection than personal, political, or ideological speech, and there are cases of advertisers losing in court, c.f. Spann v J.C. Penney, as well as decisions that explicitly limit the First Amendment protections of commercial speech.
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.
There is no conceivable Supreme Court configuration that would uphold a ban on advertising.
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").
Oh I totally agree, a blanket ban on advertising isn’t remotely realistic, ever. It’s a silly idea, and I doubt what most people want. I’m just sayin’ the Central Hudson test makes commercial speech less protected than, say, political rants, and it could in theory be used to reduce protections, even if that’s not happening right now. Either way, banning ads and free speech protections are two somewhat separate issues, ads could be legal without having any free speech status.
I'm wondering if it's possible that the reality might be working the other way around than perceived. Could there be steaming can of worms that modern rampant commercial advertising is venting and holding down?
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?
You're presenting an idea here by means of a lot of implicit leaps, and I don't even know where I'm supposed to leap to at each stage. It's like a logic game that I'm failing at.
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.
No, I'm saying what I had said in the first paragraph of my comment. I'm saying, the reward might not be the fuel, but it could be fire retardant, and you might not want to cut it off.
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!
I wonder if I should point out that your link says that it's when people stop being paid that quality declines. However, if "ads for ads' sake" became a thing, it would presumably look like propaganda, in support of whatever the advert-artist personally cares about.
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's 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.
So is fraud, libel, extortion, sexual harassment, impersonating a police officer, perjury, incitement, performing a stage play without a license from the writer, etc. but this hasn't stopped congress from passing laws to abridge the freedom of these particular kinds of speech. It's quite clear that the "freedom of speech" referenced in the 1st amendment pertains to expressing one's own sentiment, and that this is not the same as expressing something one is paid to express. The mental gymnastics necessary to convince oneself that spending money is protected speech are likewise ridiculous.
Legislatures have tried to pass laws regulating commercial speech in various ways and the track record is generally that they get their asses handed to them by the court, because this is basically the most protected right in our system.
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.
Courts consistently interpreting a law wrongly is cause for amending said law to clarify its intent. Amending the constitution is certainly something that can happen within the system of governance as evidenced by the fact that we are discussing an amendment to it. It's just a law, not a religious document. Granted, clarifying the 1st to read more like Madison's draft is unlikely to happen anytime soon for cultural reasons.
When it's literally 100 years of consistent jurisprudence this kind of argument loses some of its teeth. Liberal courts, conservative courts, modern courts, old courts, they all seem to agree on this point.
> Legislatures have tried to pass laws regulating commercial speech in various ways and the track record is generally that they get their asses handed to them by the court,
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.)
The fact that the boundary can be a bit blurry does not prevent it to be useful. Yes there may be corner cases to thunk about ans that can vary, as with all laws. It's bot perfect but its better than current out of control situation.
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's 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.
> 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?
I suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_(economics). Some authors use the term "product" in opposition to "service", while others consider services to be a type of product. Not being clear about that distinction is one of the fatal flaws in imiric's proposal.
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.
That makes even less sense than I thought. So things that "are not made out of matter" can be advertised. Like I can advertise YouTube, AWS, Netflix, pretty much 99% of online services, movies, a doctor practice as long as I just do diagnostics, landscaping as long as I just cut and clean. I just can't advertise anything where I'd hand you something "made out of matter". What kind of sense does that make?
I agree with the general thought - doing something like this would give giant mega corporations a huge leg up from verticals.
> 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.
ok, what if ABC buys a 55% stake in Bounty and puts ads for them because they are the same owner now? What if it's 10% stake? Can they claim (truthfully) they want to increase the value of their stock?
You're trying to make this sound very complicated but it's not. In this world without paid advertising, ABC can advertise their own shows. They cannot advertise things for other companies, whether they own them or not.
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.
> it's less manipulation and noise for the rest of us.
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.
Maybe you should post a proposal for a law that's a little more specific than "is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising." Then we can see if it is in fact possible to prevent 99%, or for that matter 50%, of the harm that comes from modern advertising, without outlawing other things.
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.
I think the language is OK, it’s just that you are consistently ignoring “in order to promote a product” clause.
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.
I wasn't ignoring it; I specifically criticized it in detail. Your interpretation does not seem defensible or even coherent, but maybe you could propose less ambiguous language that clearly lays out the interpretation you have in mind. That way we can evaluate its tradeoffs.
I’m confident from PoV of any judge, the waiter in question gets paid for serving meals.
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.
I'm not a lawyer, nor is it my job to come up with loophole-free regulation. People in those professions can think hard about this problem, and do a much better job than some layperson who thought about it for a few minutes on an internet forum. Even for them, though, coming up with laws without loopholes that are not too restrictive in legitimate situations is often impossible, so it's ridiculous that you would expect the same from me.
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.
Your addendum, "Only applies for companies, and only to those with more than $100,000 ARR," doesn't help at all; it still prohibits the three examples in most cases and still has the barter loophole.
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.
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. This is literally what we elect and pay them to do.
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.
I agree that the current system is harmful in exactly the ways you describe, but I don't see you contributing anything towards solving those problems or even understanding what a solution would consist of. Instead you are criticizing policymakers for failing to satisfy your preferences even though you can't articulate them coherently yourself.
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.
Most likely you paid someone to make the sign, and someone else to put it up. Even if you made and installed the sign yourself, you paid for the materials.
I am thinking outside blackboard ones, where owners write message in chalk [0] - they don't pay anyone to write the words, nor do they pay anyone to "install" it (= take it out).
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.
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
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.
Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising.
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.
Exactly. You're paying a realtor to promote your house, including on their site, to sell it.
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.
Surely there is a difference between me (private person ) selling my 1 car/house or company Y advertising their latest car model (they want to sell 1000ds).
Yes, there's a difference in the number of items you're selling.
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.
It's remarkable that you put all that thought into coming up with holes in my one-line argument, and no thought into steelmanning it.
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.
> is money being exchanged in order to promote a product?
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.
> Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising.
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.
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.)
So no third-party advertising. But that would then create bundling schemes where the restaurant sells you a bundle of their goods and some third-party goods together, for a kickback on the backend, or they make referrals.
No, that's why I said 'unsolicited' rather than 'third-party', so take the motorway billboard toll road example - if you also happen to own the car dealership or the webapp, you can't advertise that, because that's not what I've come to your motorway for.
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.
How can you be so certain the consumer experience would remain the same when the marketing incentives change entirely? They’re literally called super markets.
No paid advertising, whether that involves financial compensation, in kind gifts, or something else.
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.
Vaccine ads are a great example, in that large parts of the population consider them as fake propaganda. Trump supporters were up in arms against Biden/Dems for promoting vaccines during COVID. With your logic RFK Jr would be very happy!
What about just restrict it to advertising on the internet?
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.
>What about just restrict it to advertising on the internet?
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.
It raises the question, it does not beg it. Begging the question is e.g saying 'If advertisement was bad for you it would be forbidden. Since it's not forbidden it's not bad for us. Therefor we should not forbid it.'
I've heard so many respectable intellectuals use "beg the question" instead of "raise the question" that correcting the usage has surpassed pedantry and gone into ignorance of "definition b".
It's like correcting someone on the pronunciation of French-English forte. It just gets you uninvited next time.
You don't need to draw a precise line, just one where things over the line are clearly undesirable, like billboards on roadways, TV commercials, etc. There are some countries with virtually no advertising. People who visit the DPRK come back saying it's like "Ad block for your life".
Corporate personhood exists so that you can be hired by a company instead of a specific person in HR or have a cellphone contract with Verizon instead of a particular sales associate and companies can buy real estate and so on without requiring a whole bunch of extra legal work defining all the ways in which corporations are legally treated like natural persons. That necessarily includes giving corporations some of the same rights and duties as natural persons. But I do think that corporations have been given too many rights which have been interpreted too broadly. The notion that a corporation has a constitutional right to spend however much money it wants to influence politics due to free speech is ridiculous.
This is precisely the sort of statement that derails the discussion and makes it impossible to even have. I imagine there’s a name for this sort of thing, perhaps some exquisitely long German word?
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.
One man's propaganda is another man's truth-to-power.
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.
There is a big difference between advertising and information. First, most people are generally not being paid by big energy alternatives to promote it. Of course we can talk about things. What we wouldn't be able is to be paid by someone to have a specific public discourse.
> There's a big difference between advertising and information
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.
Those explication videos are product instructions. They can still be made available in the youtube channel of this brand (and for my bike, they were and I'm glad for them).
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.
So you only get to see the bike tutorial if you have the money to pay for it. That widens the haves / have-nots gap; I'm not sure that's a desirable goal.
Not all countries have the same free speech protections as America. I can easily imagine a country that simply has a bureaucracy whose approval is required to publish TV programming, or one that bans banner ads in social media, billboards, restricts shop signs in various ways, requires all packaging in the store to be black and white, etc. Advertising doesn’t have to ve banned outright. It could be killed by a thousand specific rules targeting the most obnoxious forms, provided there wasn’t a constitutional issue in the country implementing these measures.
Yet we have laws against fraud, rape, and so on. Where do you draw the line for those? There are some crystal clear cases, and there are unclear cases where you could argue forever.
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.
There is no line, to fully and strictly ban advertising we basically have to abandon democracy and capitalism. Advertising and capitalism a so tightly related that you can't have one without the other.
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.
>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?
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?
> This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech?
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.
More than ads, it's engagement algorithms that are killing us. We should outlaw those first and then see where we end up. Engagement algorithms do nothing except ruin society by incentivizing content creators to lie to us, and to make videos that are psychically horrible to society.
Most likely these algorithms would become useless in an advertisement-free world, where retaining users for longer on the platform no longers means making more money.
Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s also a necessary evil.
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.
> Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it—but it’s also a necessary evil.
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.
Review pages are often ad based. Unless you paid for it. But I still think having to pay for reviews is a better option. That way the reviews are the product not me.
Well some of this is a gray area right? If you have a listing website for example that lists all the electricians in a given geographic area, that's technically an ad, but you'd assume someone wouldn't be looking at the page unless they were looking for an electrician. I wouldn't call that intrusive or unpleasant or worthy of a ban and I don't think anyone would.
1. Discovery
For known problems, sure! we probably don’t need ads anymore.
But for unknown problems, we still do. When you're not even aware that a solution exists, or that your current approach could be improved, advertising can spark that initial awareness. At that stage, you don’t even know what to search for.
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.
#1 was true, but I find that this is one area where LLMs shine: even when you can't trust the answers directly, they can give inspiration to find the right questions.
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.
Wikipedia isn't funded by ad revenue. Kagi isn't funded by ad revenue. Anna's Archive isn't funded by ad revenue. The Internet Archive isn't funded by ad revenue. You can torrent all the knowledge you'll ever need and all you need is an internet connection.
I disagree. Advertising is a zero-sum game. If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.
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.
>If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.
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.
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.
So, if no one competed to get ahead of competitors, by making better or cheaper products and to grab the available marketshare, we would just have better and cheaper products without it? Sounds flawed to me.
Not sure what you mean. People would definitely still compete on quality and price in a world without advertising: much moreso, because they couldn't just spend money for sales without improving their product. If they wanted to improve sales, they'd have to either get better or cheaper.
I disagree, one component of advertising is discovering things you didn’t even know existed. Having to actively look stuff like that up would be much harder.
i haven't come across a single ad that would have helped me to discover things i didn't know existed. and i don't think i missed out on anything because of that.
Really? I definitely learned about Send Cut Send and PCBWay from advertising. I had no idea that kind of custom manufacturing was even possible let alone affordable.
That component doesn’t matter because advertising also makes it harder to find what you need, since everyone is doing it. If you didn’t know it previously existed, how do you even know if it will solve your problem like it says it does?
I see an ad for the steam deck and think “wow, a portable gaming console allowing me to play computer games while on trips. Very cool!”, but I am not actively googling for gaming consoles every month to see what’s released.
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.
Nobody is saying there wouldn't be catalogs and "new release" feeds... they would just have to be dedicated and voluntary and not polluting everything else I'm trying to do.
If the ad was misleading, no. But I don’t just go to a movie after seeing an ad, I then look up reviews and other information about it. The ad is just useful to know that the movie exists and is roughly something I would be interested in.
And why would you want to discover commercial products (NOT "things") that you didn't knew existed? That's some form of brainwashing that I don't accept and would gladly get rid of.
I think the answer is obvious, no? Because there may be products that can make your life better but you don't know about them. It's a bit like asking "why would you ever want a medical treatment you didn't know existed?" Because I, not being a doctor, don't know of the existence of most medical treatments but some may be able to cure diseases or other ailments I have.
Let me give you an example: I don't mind raking leaves, but I hate the step where you have to use the rake in one hand and your hand in the other to pick them up, spilling leaves on the trail to the bin.
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.
Because they could improve your life. To come up with good examples, one would have to know more about your preferences.
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?
> one would have to know more about your preferences
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.
I'd happily exchange that discoverability for control of my own informational environment.
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.
Without advertising you won't have search, because that's how search engines are funded. And you'll also lose pretty much all of the online options for word-of-mouth, too.
I don't think it's a zero sum game. Some degree of advertising will make a product more discoverable regardless of whether competitors advertise or not.
>If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.
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.
I think a market without advertising is sufficiently "alternative reality" that it's difficult to say what it would look like. The giant incumbents are only giant incumbents because of ads to start with.
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.
Why would it be difficult to say what it would look like? Humans and markets exist for many thousands of years. Advertising in its current form for a couple of hundred. Just look back in time, there were markets then too :)
> 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?
> If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.
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.
If nobody advertised then first mover advantage would be everything. How would a new product come to market and compete with no way of getting new users except word of mouth?
> It also promotes fairer market competition by giving smaller players a shot at visibility,
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 what they said about patents, and so far it just means players with more money buy up more patents.
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.
I don't think it should be referred to as a 'necessary evil' (by the following definition of that term):
"something unpleasant that must be accepted in order to achieve a particular result"
For one thing the term 'advertising' is broad same as many words (ie 'Doctor' or 'Computer guy' or 'Educator'). Second it's not unpleasant although like with anything some of it could be. (Some of it is funny and entertaining).
> 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:
The idea of product discovery has value. Advertising funds product discovery by taking some of the funds that you pay for goods, and funneling that money to platforms and creators that are willing to help others discover that product.
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.
Businesses will then send the discoverers free samples, provide literature, and send “advisers” to talk with the discoverers, and you’ll be right back where you started.
Is it a consideration with monetary value? Then it’s advertising, much like how bribing public official is still (theoretically) illegal even if you don’t do it in cash. If it’s not, then the discoverer has no incentive to act according to the business’s demand.
I’m not understanding why this is a good standard: right now, anyone who sees a billboard or a TV ad has no incentive to act according to the business’s demand, yet you want to ban those. So you think it would be OK to advertise to discoverers, but not to final purchasers.
For the record, I’m not saying this is the perfect model and we should move to it immediately. My only claim is that it isn’t crazy.
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.
Ad business stopped to be necessary and started to be almost exclusively evil years ago. If you pay sociologists and psychologists to design „most effective ad” for you, something is clearly wrong. 100 years ago ads were indeed ways of discovering products and services. But now ads are almost exclusively battlefields for more and more money paid for by consumers’ anxiety, wellbeing and health when ads are more and more dishonest and hostile.
I feel that this is a very black and white view of the issue. I don't want to see billboards as I drive down the freeway, but I have no choice (in the US) if I need to get somewhere far away. Several states have banned outdoor billboards, should those governments be dissolved?
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.
"Congress shall MAKE NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
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.
There are already established legal limits on speech.
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.
That a significant proportion of advertising involves deceit, coercion, and captive audiences says a great deal about the nature of it. The First Amendment codifies the right to say what you want, to print or otherwise make public your thoughts. That doesn't give anyone, or anything, a right to force their ideas into the minds of the public or a subset thereof. And while advertisers are not quite yet forcing anyone to consume their product at the proverbial "barrel of a gun" they are far beyond the norms of human communication.
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.
Free speech has exceptions that include commercial speech and advertising, especially false advertising. So are you talking about US free speech laws, or about some other kind of free speech?
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.
A law cannot remove a natural right. A law can protect a natural right or oppress people by using violence against them if they exercise their natural right.
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.
Which historical documents are you referring to? Are you talking about the Declaration of Independence, which doesn’t mention free speech, nor define what natural rights are, nor provide any protection from any governments when asserting natural rights?
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.
I'm glad you're taking time to learn about it. But all a state can do is either pass laws to protect natural rights, or they can pass laws to punish people with violence for exercising their natural rights.
All laws are backed by violence. That's called law enforcement.
What do you have to say to the 40-year-old man who says he has a natural right to have sex with 10-year-olds and for the state to punish him for it is just as wrong as state support for slavery was?
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.
I would tell the man that he should just take a class or read the Wikipedia on what a natural right is if he's so interested in it and using it to protect himself. I would tell him that commenting on it in this manner embarrasses himself and exposes that he has no education on the topic.
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.
> 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.
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.
People in other countries also have natural rights. Even if they live under oppressive governments, the right to free speech still exists. It's the same logic used by abolitionists to justify ending slavery.
"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."
> 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.”
Belated reply here, but the answer may be interesting to some people: when comments breaking the site guidelines stay live and/or unflagged, it gives the impression that it's ok to post that way to HN. Therefore, even if the two of you were both fine with the interaction, it has a negative effect on the community.
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...)
This comment and others you've posted in the subthread are in breach of the HN guidelines. You can't keep commenting on HN if you're going to attack people like this. Please remind yourself of the guidelines and adhere to them in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm fine with it. I don't mind his "attacks" it's just an abstract intellectual topic. Not everyone is high in neuroticism. Some people learn from heated debate. You're only in favor of learning styles that make you feel good? We're debating in good spirit.
Good spirited debate is great, personal insults destroy what the site is for and are a turnoff for other community members. Just please edit out the swipes and we’re all good.
This comment and others you've posted in the subthread are in breach of the HN guidelines. You can't keep commenting on HN if you're going to attack people like this. Please remind yourself of the guidelines and adhere to them in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Someone else made the point that ads cost money, so this isn't about free speech. I guess making advertising free would be the same as banning it since it exists to be sold.
If you follow Merriam Webster for 'transaction' it absolutely is:
"a communicative action or activity involving two parties or things that reciprocally affect or influence each other"
> 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 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.
I watch crowd here since 2011, and asking cowards not to downvote will probably have opposite effect :)
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 :)
An outright ban on advertising makes for a compelling thought experiment, but ultimately it's too simplistic to work as a real-world solution. The fundamental issue isn't advertising per se; rather, it's the aggressive exploitation of personal data, invasive tracking, and addictive attention-maximizing techniques that power today's ad-driven business models.
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.
People who pay for consumer research type services. "I want a general-purpose systems programming language with a C-like syntax that compiles to native code. It should be statically typed and supports both automatic (garbage collected) and manual memory management." One micro payment later I have a list of links and reviews. In this case the research is the product instead of me.
As long as a search engine can find your product, so can they. That's their job. Whether they would be able to review every candidate is another matter.
I've known several people who developed quite a nice product, but felt that promotion and marketing were unethical. They failed to move a single copy, and wound up bitter and disillusioned.
> 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.
I guess the idea is to ban certain types of advertising. It’s a fun thought experiment and practical — it’s why some country roads don’t have billboards and some do.
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.
We definitely need to argue about the line. This is the internet, isn’t it?
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
I like that a lot. Same reason plastics and fuels should be taxed but not outlawed. If some rich dude wants to drive a land yacht, he can pay it into the welfare system with his gasoline taxes, win-win
I actually in principle have no fundamental problem with advertising, but it's execution on the internet I have many, many issues with. Putting an ad in a newspaper, or on the side of a building, or during a break in a tv show seems perfectly reasonable to me.
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.
I agree and I just wish to god I could simply tell those poor advertisers what I actually am interested in because they are just so consistently wrong and it annoys me.
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.
> 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?
> Except that they can and do, as you outline below. All laws are arbitrary.
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.
The problem is you can't outlaw an entire class of speech as the article proposes.
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.
Good luck altering the constitution to allow for content based prohibition of speech.
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?
I'm not convinced modern advertising qualifies as free speech. It's often manipulative, used by bad faith actors, used for tracking, slows websites down, is obtrusive, disrupts concentration, etc.
None of those things exempt something from speech protection in the US, as far as I'm aware. Different countries have different laws, but here you are legally allowed to say just about anything (including way worse stuff than any of the things you mentioned).
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.
> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles.
...
> 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.
In the last 40 years how many millions of man years have been put into manipulating people/breaking down their internal barriers by the ad agencies? By social media companies? By media companies? In the hundreds of thousands of man years at least (but more likely in the millions to tens of millions). There have been around 80 billion human years of output in that time and sales are a huge part of civilization so easily in the 10s of millions of human years of energy put into how to better manipulate/break down/re-train people.
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.
Define advertising. Studies suggest that as much as 80% of news articles may have been placed by PR firms rather than generated through independent reporting. This forum is a classic case where blog posts are masquerading as authentic content, when in reality, they're simply another form of advertising.
The internet is so full of authoritarians wanting to outlaw everything thinking that will work and not even thinking about supply and demand, definition of what is actually ilegtal and enforcement of that.
It's hilarious. For a forum where people pretend to be smart it's absolutely missing critical thinking.
This makes no sense. I build a great product. How the hell am I supposed to tell anyone about it outside of my immediate friends and family? Am I supposed to rely on the network effect to reach an audience? That sounds insane.
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.
Well, personally, I think you shouldn’t even tell your friends and family. That kind of “native advertising” is ruining human relationships. People should stumble upon your product. If someone mentions it to someone else, that alone should be grounds to shutter your company. Even so-called “catchy domain names” are a deep evil that we didn’t have in the heyday of the US: the ‘70s. Your product should be named exactly what it does and your company should be named as the concatenation of its products.
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.
I actually agree. Telling friends and family will get you more of a 'flash in the pan' response. They are not content creators or influencers. You need to do advertising to figure out if your product/business is even economically feasible.
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.
>If someone mentions it to someone else, that alone should be grounds to shutter your company.
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.
This is one of the reasons I think food should all have the same packaging color and consistency. If everything was a grey paste that came in an unlabeled brown plastic-lined cardboard box your girlfriend wouldn't be able to manipulate you like that.
Most people who protest oil use cars, roads and plastics, all made of oil.
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.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. “Make illegal the parts of the economy I see and I don’t like, but not the parts of the economy that belong to the same category but I simply do not see” is just one of many flaws of low effort insight blogs.
Some countries (Poland?) has experimented with banning advertising in public spaces. Think bill boards. This has lead to very clean and good looking cities. I don’t think the it’s unreasonable to ban ads in other places too.
Redmond, WA has a ban on billboards. Locals can see this demonstrated by driving 124th St. and crossing Willows Rd into Kirkland. First thing you’ll see are billboards.
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.
I love this article because I think this is the conversation we should be having. Lots of advertising is harmful, some of it is useful on balance, and some of it is too hard to ban without infringing on other desirable speech. But I do think we should be critically thinking about all advertising and outlawing certain flavors of it.
Billboards let landlords skim extra money by making the public space significantly more hostile to everyone else. Fuck em.
There’s a ban here in BC except on indigenous land. Which is scattered throughout where I live. So you have these primitive, ugly things sticking out in clusters wherever people are allowed to put them. I wish people didn’t need the money to allow those on their land.
I use ublock origin on Firefox and next dns on my router with a block list. I pay for ad free YouTube. My kids had a lesson in how annoying commercials are during a trip where they tried to watch a BBC animal documentary and had to see the same commercial five times in a row because I guess not enough advertisers signed up with the provider. I don't like billboards. I'm pretty sympathetic to getting rid of advertising and do so as much as possible in my own life.
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 503 ms ] threadThere 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.
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.
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 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.
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?
So what's keeping this from being a reality?
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.
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.
https://bankaxept.no/en/services/backup-solution
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).
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?
Many laws do draw lines in areas that are equally difficult. Its a problem, but far from a fatal one.
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.
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.
A whole lot of money wants ads though.
Is buying packages of random baseball/pokemon/etc cards gambling then?
I’m always amazed by how much ink gets poured before somebody mentions the obvious: this question has already been answered in a different context.
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.
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.
Many countries have laws against corruption that are structured like that.
(Schrösédinger, if you will.)
- 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 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."
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.
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.
1. https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I basically agree with the spirit of what you're saying but the line is not clear.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Isn’t it? You receive money when people buy your product because of your advertising.
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.
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.
The New York Times Company can say anything they want about anything, and especially political candidates.
And while I'm inclined to believe not everyone should have free speech, I'm also aware that denying it is authoritarian.
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].
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commercial_speech
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").
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.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
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!
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.)
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43599948
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's like correcting someone on the pronunciation of French-English forte. It just gets you uninvited next time.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's the American spirit! As a European, it terrifies me that anyone would want to give advice to a doctor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I hate ads but there would be no search engines without ads unless they were backed by governments
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
And regarding word of mouth: Is word of mouth for great products really random?
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.
You have an extremist point of view that your right to free speech is granted to you by the government.
This is inherently a subjective matter. It's not possible to be objectively incorrect on whether or not speech protection should be absolute.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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...)
Good luck.
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 :)
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.
> 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
I like that framing.
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.
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?
Good point. It’s specifically paid speech that’s the problem.
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?
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.
...
> 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.
It's hilarious. For a forum where people pretend to be smart it's absolutely missing critical thinking.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580586 - 8 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558438 - 4 comments
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.
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.
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!