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What exactly do you mean by "targeted advertising"? I'm guessing you probably mean "behavioral advertising", which is a subset of "targeted advertising".

Targeted advertising includes contextual advertising (e.g., a company putting an ad for their bird watching binoculars on a bird watching blog) and I'm having trouble thinking of any reason to ban that.




I'd even go to banning all commercial ads, like several cities have done offline.

Reasons?

Click bait, boosts consumerism, ads imply essentially a tax for everyone (remember that ads have to be paid by the consumers), CEO spam, annoying, environmental costs


You should ask an economist to model this scenario for you and then see if you still feel this way.


Making everything rely on subscription (consider European TV license fees as such) and word-of-mouth is what you end up with. Except in the case of former, over-subscription is getting into a problem too.


why does nobody think of micro payments?


Micro payments would be the way to go, but the current payment systems do not enable this method of transaction.

Removing ads would require being willing to make micro payments to some random shady news site you found on google to read their article.

In the current payment world, that would require sharing a lot of private information in the case of PayPal or, even worse, sharing your CC number.

The Digital Euro might fix this, if it turns out to be well implemented.

Once a well implemented Digital Euro arrives, an internet without advertising would be a real possibility.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE comedy sketch called kill all the poor


Oh no, companies can't manipulate people as easily and some will go bankrupt, because they can't give people as much FOMO and there will be less trash in the internet


> boosts consumerism

Don't we live in a capitalist world?


Consumerism is overrated, but we all want it because neighbour has nice thing


What does it matter?


People need to constantly buy stuff for the economy to keep growing, this is how the economy is designed.


At some point we have to deal with the limits to growth, indeed.

The economy should serve the people, not the way around.


This goes against the idea of capitalism. It expects infinite growth. If growth stops, we need a different economic model.


Which is fine, no economic system lasted forever, and capitalism is not expected to last forever either.




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