I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.
And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
"We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is and we understand scaling it is immensely valuable and fundamentally changes everything.
"We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway, don't tread on me, yadda yadda.
It's so transparent to me now, and I've passed this curse onto you.
Nothing else in law works this way. No definition is ironclad. This is what legislators, agencies, and courts are for. We all know this.
One reason why the definition is more important when it comes to outlawing behavior is that when you get it wrong you are actually preventing people from doing something that is important and valuable to them.
Ironically this is something lawyers and judges would pick up on immediately. You need an underlying principle of harm that can be applied consistently.
> you are actually preventing people from doing something that is important and valuable to them.
There are many things individuals will consider "important and valuable to them" that are harmful to others.
We prevent individuals from harming others for their own self-gain because that's what societies do.
This is an argument against people having rights at all. "Oh, you think you're entitled to X? Well, in certain scenarios, X might cause harm. You might use free speech to advocate for something bad, or leverage your immunity to unjust search & seizure to conceal evidence of a crime."
Consider that the author considers propaganda to be a form of advertising, and suggests we ban propaganda. Well, Fox News is is probably one of the most influential sources of propaganda in our era, and they're just publishing news with a strong political slant. This anti-propaganda law effectively would have to make it illegal to publish political opinion pieces. That would be absurdly draconian.
For the record, I'm strongly anti-advertising, but a complete ban on advertisement would be impossible to construct because you can't draw a sharp line between ads and free expression.
> Well, Fox News is is probably one of the most influential sources of propaganda in our era, and they're just publishing news with a strong political slant.
Actually (and hilariously) Fox News according to their own court filings do not publish news, they are an entertainment product.
And I say ironically because that's exactly the mechanism people are clamoring for in this discussion: it's the courts. Lawyers argue and courts eventually decide definitions all the time, because it's highly impractical to belabor and endlessly debate passing new laws because we don't have ironclad definitions in them beforehand.
If you want my humble opinion, in a legal/ban sense, I would define advertising as:
> Communicative material that is placed strategically by publishers or media for a price/by way of other agreement to drive awareness of products or services with the intent to generate attention and sales of said products or services.
Kudos for providing a somewhat sensible definition. This helps by addressing the free speech issues (at least to an extent^[1]), but I think there are other problems as well.
The economical fallout would be extensive. Google's and Meta's business model (and that of many others) would basically disappear overnight. While I'm not a fan of either, and think there should be much stricter regulation for (very large) tech-companies, this would make financing of a lot of important products infeasible. But not just in tech. Think about product placement in movies or television, banners in big sporting events etc.
Who'd pay for that? The state? With whose money?
Also, it would make entering markets much harder, if you're not a household name already. If I read your definition correctly, you couldn't even give a complimentary account for your SaaS product to a reviewer ("by way of other agreement") to enable them to test your software (and hopefully write favorably about it if they're convinced).
This would definitely hurt consumers.
I think you should be allowed to try to change minds. If anything, we should outlaw the massive tracking effort involved in advertising.
[1]: What about a political party publishing a newspaper and paying their staff? Is that okay? I could construct more examples, and life is even messier. On the other hand, I have to admit, that the focus on the payment aspect makes this much more palatable to me.
There was likely economic fallout many would call extensive when we mandated equal wages for minorities and an end to child labor, and yet businesses soldier on. Turns out, if you’re selling products people need, momentary disruptions and changing market conditions generally don’t mean you suddenly cannot conduct business.
> Think about product placement in movies or television, banners in big sporting events etc. Who'd pay for that? The state? With whose money?
One of sport fans biggest complaints is the overwhelming number of ads and the overbearing, bloated organizations behind pro tier sports. It seems like bankrupting a lot of them and letting teams return to public goods funded by municipalities would be a huge step forward into preserving sports as a social event, not a profit seeking venture.
And it’s not like pro sports aren’t already benefitting from taxpayers left and right. We could just get rid of the money men up top and let things settle where they may. Sure we may not get blockbuster sports events anymore, but maybe more people could then afford to actually attend?
> This would definitely hurt consumers.
Consumers LOATHE SaaS. They would cheer for it to be killed off.
> What about a political party publishing a newspaper and paying their staff?
I don’t see how that would run afoul of my definition?
> There was likely economic fallout many would call extensive when we mandated equal wages for minorities and an end to child labor, and yet businesses soldier on.
Advertising isn't child labor. If there was something immoral about telling people about your product, you'd have a point.
> It seems like bankrupting a lot of them and letting teams return to public goods funded by municipalities would be a huge step forward into preserving sports as a social event, not a profit seeking venture.
I disagree. I don't think the state has any place here. And profit seeking will not stop just because the source of the money changes and there's less of it.
> We could just get rid of the money men up top and let things settle where they may. Sure we may not get blockbuster sports events anymore, but maybe more people could then afford to actually attend?
If there's less money in it, there will be less supply, so I don't see how it would be easier for people to afford attendance.
Your local little league team couldn't even get a sponsorship for their uniforms anymore.
> Consumers LOATHE SaaS. They would cheer for it to be killed off.
SaaS was just an example for a new product trying to gain market share.
Also, right now they are free to not use SaaS products if they do hate the concept. Afterwards they're practically forced to not use it, because it's much harder to get one off the ground.
> I don’t see how that would run afoul of my definition?
Well, they're paying people to write positively about them and their product/politics. I can see it.
> Advertising isn't child labor. If there was something immoral about telling people about your product, you'd have a point.
It wasn't a moral argument, though I can see how you read it that way. I'm just saying, we change the market via regulation (or at least, used to) all the time, and businesses survive despite their endless moaning about it.
They complained about us not letting them keep cancer-causing chemicals in the break room too, mandatory break times for given lengths of work shifts, etc. etc. etc. They always whine about they'll go broke if they have to X or Y, no matter how reasonable it is.
> And profit seeking will not stop just because the source of the money changes and there's less of it.
State funded operations don't generally prioritize profits unless directed to by weird politicians who think public goods should make money, like the current head of the USPS. Generally, tax funded orgs are just us going "we would like this service, and everyone in the city/county/state/country chipping in like $30 a year means we don't need to worry about it.
> Your local little league team couldn't even get a sponsorship for their uniforms anymore.
Yeah, again. Fund it with taxes. Little league players shouldn't be billboards. If we want this stuff, we should have the political will to allocate money to pay for it. I don't see why if we decide we want little league baseball that said baseball team should then need to make the rounds in the community with a hat out. That's silly.
> Also, right now they are free to not use SaaS products if they do hate the concept.
No they aren't. If you want Microsoft Office, any Adobe product, Quickbooks, just to name a few, your only options are subscriptions to them.
> Well, they're paying people to write positively about them and their product/politics.
I mean just having a newsletter that advocates for socialism doesn't mean you're advertising socialism. It's propaganda, and that's fine. Propaganda isn't necessarily a bad thing despite the modern attitudes towards it. The pro-WWII ads that sold bonds were propaganda. The cartoons depicting Hitler as a buffoon were propaganda.
In any case though, I wouldn't consider that advertising. In my mind, advertising would only occur when a given publication is including content referencing a product or service where it would normally not otherwise be.
> I'm just saying, we change the market via regulation (or at least, used to) all the time, and businesses survive despite their endless moaning about it.
Ah, got it. Then I'd say we should only regulate things that need regulation. I don't think advertising is one of these. The data collection happening in the background on the other hand...
> State funded operations don't generally prioritize profits [...]
Yes, but people generally do, even when they're funded by government. They just lose the incentive to create a good product.
> Yeah, again. Fund [the local little league] with taxes.
No. Why should I pay for something like that?
> If you want Microsoft Office, any Adobe product, Quickbooks, just to name a few, your only options are subscriptions to them.
Yes. And there's LibreOffice, GIMP/Inkscape and GNUCash (and many others) if you don't like that model.
BTW, these aren't what I was thinking about. I assume big players would generally be favored by such a prohibition, because they're already known to a wide audience.
> I mean just having a newsletter that advocates for socialism doesn't mean you're advertising socialism. It's propaganda, and that's fine. Propaganda isn't necessarily a bad thing despite the modern attitudes towards it.
I agree with you, but the article explicitly lumps together propaganda and advertising. I think that's dangerous. Socialists should be free to make their case, even though I think it's idiotic
So is the fallout from Trump's new tariffs, yet they still got done.
I don't think the government cares about economic fallout unless it affects billionaires, so you're right, advertising will never be banned because it would cut into the profits of the president's richest and most vocal supporters.
My point is that US government economic policy is completely disconnected from the concept of economic fallout, so it seems silly to consider that a gating item for this hypothetical.
I read that as "the US government is already crippling the economy, so other measures potentially crippling the economy are not a problem," but maybe I'm misunderstanding you?
> My point is that US government economic policy is completely disconnected from the concept of economic fallout
Unless the economic policy stands to benefit the working class.
Tax cuts for billionaires will pass all day, with zero issues at all. Anything, and I do mean anything that stands to benefit the general public has to have three plans on how it will either pay for itself or otherwise be paid for, and if any of them involve even a slight tax increase, it will never even see a vote, let alone pass.
Advertisement is when the ad carrier receive money, goods, services, preference or other monetary equivalent. With this definition we may give a break to free expression of views.
> Well, Fox News is is probably one of the most influential sources of propaganda in our era, and they're just publishing news with a strong political slant.
That's not advertising by any standard, unless they're being paid by someone to do it (whether they currently are or not is irrelevant). Just because someone can benefit doesn't make it advertising/propaganda, it's about the whether the funding comes from someone who benefits from the particular content.
As another example, Good Mythical Morning and other YouTube shows frequently do product comparisons / tests. That clearly isn't advertising, unless the companies who make those product are sponsoring them.
> As another example, Good Mythical Morning and other YouTube shows frequently do product comparisons / tests. That clearly isn't advertising, unless the companies who make those product are sponsoring them.
Did the pay full retail price for the product or get a discount?
Did they get the product at release or in advance?
Did they get access to detailed specs or the people who built it?
Did they give feedback that went into the product?
Did they get a company/lab/event visit and some swag?
Did they get preferential access for the next product?
"Sponsoring" is just the most visible, clearly disclosed way to advertise in those. But fundamentally, getting and preserving access is immensely valuable and there may not be funds moving between the two groups.
None of us are completely unbiased. Getting those things disclosed would be a great improvement.
This law is no different than any other prohibition. It's not like we have to go back to the legal lab to figure out precisely what advertising is because, unlike things with clear definitions everyone knows like fraud, discrimination, or defamation, advertising is particularly nebulous.
Did you see which comment this is in reply to? It’s about your general description of people in tech to be hesitant and skeptical when it comes to banning things.
I'm confused by your comment, the posts are both mine? Even if I take what I think is the most charitable version of your "argument", which I think is "tech thinks things should by default exist and be permissible unless they pass an extremely stringent test", no pro-advertising person here is trying to find the outlines of what that test might be. They're all running right to "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization", which is absurd.
>
"We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is
You are describing the ability of good engineers to deal with vague and ill defined problems.
> "We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway..
Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
> It's so transparent to me now
Hope I cleared up the confusion.
> "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization"
I am not - and did not make the claim. I am explaining why you are seeing engineers care more about vagueness in one context than another.
I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.
I don't claim to know the answer here, but I hope you can see some irony in saying:
> As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
When the thing up for discussion is the hacking of our psyche to impose a will - ads - onto others, at a scale and persistence hereto unimaginable by the worst tyrants in history.
> Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
> […]
> I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.
Very well said across the board.
My stance is that any time—literally any time—someone is proposing and/or promoting a policy that can stifle, chill, and/or suppress free speech in any way, even if indirectly, the bar for justifying such a policy must necessarily be extremely high.
In theory, I actually agree with many of the arguments against advertising, but there’s a clear slippery slope with this “let’s ban advertising” line of thinking, so yes, the bare minimum is being able to concretely define what advertising even is in such a context.
Not for nothing, but slippery slope reasoning is a well-known fallacy and more or less an argument against all laws ("first they told me I couldn't kill anyone, now I can't hit anyone, now I can't talk about hitting anyone, now I can't write a story about hitting anyone or think about hitting anyone, murder laws are fascism"). The process of creating laws is about balancing rights, in this case your ability to advertise vs. your ability to be free from advertising and whatever its effects might be. The whole "banning advertising is impossible" argument (in fairness this basically the topic verbatim) is a lot less interesting than trying to find the principle or test where we can say, "this advertising seems useful to humanity" vs. "this advertising seems harmful to humanity". There's very little of the latter happening in this thread, which I think says it all.
Logical fallacies aren't automatic falsehoods. They're things that can't be proven with formal logic.
The slippery slope is a fallacy and also a thing that fairly consistently happens in politics and law.
The point far up this thread, however, was that this proposal isn't a slippery slope. It's a leaky sieve. If there is a law against speech that covers enough cases to be even slightly effective against people with lawyers, and I am powerful and don't like you, then you are going to prison.
Someone with your eye for detail would probably be embarrassed to learn that while their entire argument rests on me referring to "engineers" I never wrote the word once.
It seems like you're one of those HN people who thinks they'll convince people scrolling by with petty semantic arguments and snark. Maybe that's true! But it doesn't work on me. For example, if you're gonna make a claim like "I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation", I'd want to see evidence that deals with the fact that the courts have come up with their own standards for their own review (rational basis, strict scrutiny) and indeed have formulated their own standards for evaluating legislation entirely on their own (undue burden, imminent lawless action, etc). From your comments in this thread, I'd guess you don't know anything about laws, legislation, judicial review, and the like. But hey, don't let that stop you from warning about the dangers of "destructive power of imposing your will on others".
The difference is that often, particular things are more concretely defined. A ban on advertising might be so onerous you wouldn't even be able to 'advertise' your FOSS projects on HN.
In what way could you learn about novel commercial things in the absence of advertising? Word of mouth alone?
I don’t think it would be onerous nor ill defined. Simply make it illegal to pay someone to or receive payment for making a public announcement for a product, service, or brand. If no payment is involved, it’s fine. People are free to promote their own or others products on social media, YouTube, the side of their car or house, so long as they aren’t paid to do so. That is hardly any more convoluted or ill-defined than dozens of other laws on the books.
And yes, word of mouth and non-paid advertising is absolutely capable of spreading awareness on its own.
Out of all of HN’s biases, the violent hatred of advertising is by far one of the most misguided.
Human attention is scarce. Demand for that attention is endless. Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely (vs just regulating with guardrails). Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity. Instead of something that attempts to land on fairness (even if imperfect), no market at all guarantees unfairness.
Advertising puts a price on the scarce commodity of attention in broad strokes, and it not always, but generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising). I know, please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes.
Like all markets, we should regulate advertising to ensure it doesn’t get out of control. But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
> natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely
Ok? If that's how we define "brutal authoritarianism," I guess I'm a brutal authoritarian. There's a natural market for mob hitmen (scarce + in-demand)—are you opposed to a "brutal authoritarian" crackdown on those too?
> Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity.
Citation very much needed. Suppliers of lead paint, asbestos, ozone-destroying aerosols, contaminated foodstuffs, etc. did not regulate themselves in a decentralized manner. In fact, take virtually any toxic contaminant or hazardous product and you'll usually find that the market colluded to cover up evidence of harm, rather than "self-regulating."
> generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser
Absolutely not. Consumers do not exert demand for certain types of ads in preference to others. There's no mechanism for ads to converge toward high audience value. It's advertiser value that is optimized for, often to the detriment of consumers (e.g. advertisements for profitable scams, which have negative value).
Even if you want to argue that advertisements inform consumers to some extent, that's probably outweighed by the extent that they misinform consumers. Consider infomercial products: Regular kitchen knives don't need an advertisement because demand is inelastic. If you're cooking, you need a knife; nobody has to promote the idea of knives. But the "slap-chop" is a product with elastic demand, and thus the marginal value of advertising is much greater for them. Hence, they can afford to buy up huge amounts of ad space to drum up demand for an essentially worthless product. The advertising ecosystem has perverse incentive to promote scams.
> But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
There are a lot of noxious and socially destructive things which are not practical to ban.
You've taken small snippets of my text and stood them up as lone straw-men to argue against, instead of arguing against my actual premise.
No, murder is not comparable to advertising. And no, not once did I ever say the phrase "self-regulating" nor did I argue against regulation of advertising.
Your fundamental belief (and the prevailing view on HN) that advertising is a scam and intended to "misinform" is incorrect. Apparently I need to say this again because it's hard to grasp the concept of nuance--Are some advertisements scams? Absolutely. The market is not perfectly efficient, but again, markets trend in the direction of efficiency over long periods.
Ultimately, the vast majority of advertisements you see are for the products that are the most desired by people, hence why they can profitably continue advertising over time.
Just because you aren't interested in the product, doesn't mean it's a scam . Enough people in the audience of whatever media you consume think otherwise, hence why the company is advertising there. Again, there are absolutely stupid companies wasting money on stupid ads, but they tend to get outcompeted by the smarter ones. I get it though, giving people you believe are less intelligent than you the freedom to make decisions is frustrating.
Even in your example of the slap-chop, which you say is a "worthless product," funny enough, I literally just used a similar product yesterday to dice a large amount of onions quickly. Guess I'm stupid and I need an authoritarian like you to tell me a smarter way to live.
Alternatively though, the idea that knife makers don't promote their products is just hilarious to me. The market for kitchen knives is extremely competitive and just because the advertising doesn't take the form of a 30 second TV spot from the 1990s doesn't mean they just throw their products on the market with zero promotion. How do you think certain brands even appear on the shelves of the stores you shop in? You're gonna hate this too...turns out shelf space is scarce so shelf space is a market as well, and it's more of an economic calculation than one of technical passion. Oh no not again!
Sure it is. You made a sweeping statement about services in a market; those are both services subject to market forces. You say (supposing for the sake of argument that advertising is as harmful as the article makes it out to be) that a ban would be unacceptably authoritarian and ineffective anyway. Well, we ban harmful things in the market all the time. Such as murder.
> not once did I ever say the phrase "self-regulating"
No, you said the phrase "decentralized market regulation," which means the same thing as "the market regulating itself," and suggests the absence of any actual regulation whatsoever.
> nor did I argue against regulation of advertising
You said natural markets could only be controlled through authoritarian means, which is always worse than "decentralized market regulation." This is an argument in favour of deregulation.
> Ultimately, the vast majority of advertisements you see are for the products that are the most desired by people
No, they're for products with the largest marginal return on showing ads. That's why you often see ads for pharmaceuticals that only a tiny segment of the population will ever need—because they're highly profitable and thus advertising offers high returns.
> that advertising is a scam and intended to "misinform" is incorrect
Intended to *manipulate. Whether they inform or misinform is totally orthogonal to their purpose.
> Are some advertisements scams? Absolutely. The market is not perfectly efficient
The efficient market hypothesis applies specifically to asset markets. There's no real model of what an "efficient price" is for most consumer goods, services, or advertising campaigns, because those are not assets and do not retain market value after sale.
Anyway, this strikes me as a bizarrely dogmatic way to "debunk" the widespread presence of scams in our society. Multi-level marketing schemes have not gone anywhere, nor has the related category of self-help seminar grifts. You can keep a lie going for a very long time, and make a lot of money doing so. "Efficient markets" do not protect us from that reality.
> Guess I'm stupid
…
> and I need an authoritarian like you to tell me a smarter way to live.
Try a mandoline slicer, with the julienne teeth up.
> The market for kitchen knives is extremely competitive [even though] the advertising doesn't take the form of a 30 second TV spot[.] [...] How do you think certain brands even appear on the shelves of the stores you shop in? [...] it's more of an economic calculation
So you're telling me that, when it comes to cooking knives, the incentives at play mean I'm primarily exposed to advertising for scam products? Wow I'm glad we agree.
> Suppliers of lead paint, asbestos, ozone-destroying aerosols, contaminated foodstuffs, etc.
Not sure those are good examples, because none of them were “regulated” or banned until there was already a decent alternative available. What is the alternative to advertising, for capturing human attention?
> What is the alternative to advertising, for capturing human attention?
Unsponsored product reviews, I suppose. I'm not a proponent of a complete ban on advertising—I just find the argument being made in favour of deregulation to be deeply silly.
> Not sure those are good examples, because none of them were “regulated” or banned until there was already a decent alternative available.
The argument I'm responding to there is, "Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity." There's no mention there of the availability of alternatives—that's not the point being made.
Replace attention for kidneys. Or not being killed with swords. See how you argument works out.
Just because something is highly sought after e.g. kidneys and protection from violence doesn't mean we should commoditize it. See American health care. Some resources are inflexible and allow infinite rent seeking opportunities.
> generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising).
This is true, but only for the set of messages that produce value that can be captured by the advertiser. This set is a small subset of messages that produce value. For example, a message about the benefits of excercise/socializing/climate action would produce a lot of value, but not in a form that any single advertiser can capture. So a lot of high value messages don't get produced in the current system, and might have a better chance in a more "natural" attention economy.
Advertising also increases the value of a product, so the value of things whose value can be captured by advertisers will be inflated when compared to their value in an environment without advertising.
Quite an interesting idea tbh, however if you want to frame it in commodity terms then you should also admit that currently, this very valuable commodity is taken from its owners without their consent. You could compare it to e.g. human labour, maybe: sure, there will always be a market for it, yet we allow labour to be extracted from people only in a heavily regulated framework and don't just let it be taken by force from them. Or property: there is a near infinite demand for physical objects, yet when I own a physical object you nevertheless can't just take it from me. So it should be with our attention.
Is it taken without consent? Don't you consent when you watch YouTube, or use some ad-funded site? Don't you get something (the content) in return?
There are alternatives, but most people choose to pay with attention, so that's where creators are being pulled to. But that doesn't mean that you're forced to consume it.
It is taken without consent if you leave your house or use public transport, or use certain private sector services that are de facto required to live a normal life.
With that line of thought we'd quickly get into very strange territory. You can't use public transport without either standing or sitting on their chairs, even though you might prefer different chairs. Are they now forcing you to use their services without your consent?
You said it yourself - you literally can't use public transport without either standing or sitting on their chairs. It's a physical limitation. But it's entirely possible to use public transport without having ads shoved into your face. It's even the default! If people didn't put up ads in/around public transport, you could use public transport without seeing any.
They could simply put the chairs you like into their cars though, there's nothing stopping them from doing that. They just choose not to, much like they choose to put ads in the windows and on the door - for economical reasons.
There's obviously one issue stopping them: there are far more people using public transportation than there are chairs in there, so it's once again physically impossible to accommodate everyones tastes. This is not the case with advertising.
I think the difference here is people don't really know what they're giving up psychologically.
When you're manipulating someone to choose against their best interests, it's happening on an unconscious level and freedom of choice is completely removed from the picture. In these types of cases, no I don't believe there is consent involved.
If I go play chess against a rando at a park and lose, I lost.
If I go play chess against someone who spent 150,000 human years studying how to beat me, to say 'well, it was all up to your mental strength, same as it's always been forever, and you just weren't strong enough' is BS.
In the last 40 years (which equate to 80 billion human years of output) there has been hundreds of thousands if not millions of human years of effort put into tearing down peoples' barriers, implanting ideas, etc. This isn't 1960 madmen advertising, this is something different from all of human history. Never before have hundreds of thousands to millions of human years been dedicated to manipulating humans in such a continuous, scientifically approached way and on such ever present/connected platforms with the synchronization of message/manipulation across contexts/mediums.
Edit: Changed from using 'man years' to 'human years'.
Is it though? Amazon knows my entire 22 year purchase history and could probably write down a broadly accurate history of my weight, disposable income, mental health, and how busy I was.
And yet it seems that entirely random ads would have a better chance of catching my interest than whatever super smart master mind strategy they are doing after spending thousands of years on that problem.
Amazon knows my entire purchase history too: it's nothing. In have never shopped at Amazon.
Went to an undergraduate library to surf, and low and behold: women's underwear, and I am not a cross dresser. If you do not identify yourself you get the default.
It's almost all "AI" driven. Yes the halcinating kind.
Is that limited to ads? If someone buys a car because it looks sporty and powerful which speaks to his subconscious, was he not manipulated? Was he able to give consent to trade money for that car?
I understand where you're coming from, but psychological manipulation is everywhere and committed by everyone all the time and defining its use as voiding consent seems very problematic.
Yes it is very problematic. Im more concerned about political and sociological manipulation where lies and deceit are used to convince people to support agendas which go against there own best interests.
I'm capable of understanding humanity shares best interests and using lies and deceit to manipulate is harmful to society. It sad you have chosen to believe otherwise. So no I don't agree.
There's no clearer lack of consent than attempts by advertisers to circumvent, block, or ban ad-blockers.
These advertisers could choose to put up paywalls but that would harm their search rankings, so they don't. Instead, they play games with cloaking [1] and other SEO techniques in order to bypass the user's wishes and show them ads (or even ads + cloaked paywalls).
At least YouTube offers a paid premium service which remains ad-free.
> There's no clearer lack of consent than attempts by advertisers to circumvent, block, or ban ad-blockers.
There is consent (otherwise you wouldn't visit the website in the first place), users with adblock are just trying to minimize their exposure. Totally reasonable (I do it too), but nobody is forcing them.
That may be true for e.g. a malicious software on your computer that force-redirects your regular browsing activity to some evil site, but that's not what we're discussing.
There is consent (otherwise you wouldn't visit the website in the first place)
Clicking a link is not consent. I have no idea what I am going to see until I reach the website. My browser has rendered the website and executed their JavaScript long before I've had any chance to even process what I'm seeing, let alone consent to it.
Clicking a link is equivalent to walking into a tattoo parlour. We don't infer that I consent to receiving a tattoo just by walking through the doorway. Stealing my attention with ads is less extreme of an intrusion onto my person than a tattoo, obviously, but it is still an intrusion.
I'd say the intrusion is similar to you seeing tattoo designs after walking into a tattoo studio - it's expected and accepted, you consent by entering.
I believe that would be very difficult, it would likely create some additional interesting cases (are adblockers now fraud?), I'd be somewhat concerned of forcing that upon companies (would benefit larger companies by making the barrier to entry higher), but I don't see it causing problems at the same scale of banning all advertising.
> I believe that would be very difficult, it would likely create some additional interesting cases (are adblockers now fraud?)
I don't know if companies consider it fraud, but for example Telly is giving away a TV as long as you let it eat your data and serve you ads, and if they figure out you're preventing that somehow they want the TV back [0]. So models like this countenance some kind of evasion at least a little.
I've asked other people this same question because most of the time platforms don't make advertising opt-in/out, basically for any amount of money. The best answer I've gotten--which I buy--is that the value in ads/marketing/data isn't 1 person, it's the aggregate. So like, if you have 1M users generating $100k, but then 500k of those users opt-out each for a dollar, ostensibly it seems like this is equivalent but the value of data on 500k users isn't $500k, it's substantially less, so the opt-out isn't a dollar, it's more like $5 or something, which makes this a non-option. So conceiving of this business model as a kind of "advertising lets you have this 'for free'" is only true in the most literal sense, as long as you don't think your individual data or privacy has any value or you ignore the implication that you could opt-out for whatever that value is.
Beyond that, it creates perverse incentives. We don't think that advertising benefits people, we have a whole other category called "Public Service Announcements" that kind of benefits people, and represents a sliver of actual "advertising". Say what you want about ads for diabetes meds or whatever, but they're not PSAs. The value to the consumer isn't the ad but what the ad funds, which makes platforms (tv stations, social media network, whatever) very interested in finding the exact line where you have both maximum advertising revenue and maximum engagement... which is a euphemistic way of saying "we want to trap you in our platform for as long as possible so we can make as many ad dollars on you as possible". That's bad! Even the value you're supposedly getting--the content--is now geared towards making you watch more ads instead of whatever you thought you were getting (sober political commentary, funny dance videos, makeup tips, whatever). This perfectly diagnoses the slop of media these days; I think there's no real disagreement here.
Finally, I think advertising is just 100% weird on its own. It sounds innocuous, but the business of advertising is persuasion: fine at the "marketing grad out of uni" level, real terrifying at the "billions of dollars convincing people to buy things they don't need and feel things they wouldn't otherwise feel about 'brands' or issues" level. There is no real regulation of this either; companies can spend as much money as they want literally blanketing our buildings, skies, cars, and media broadly with their message, which can be things like, "Happy Mother's Day" or "don't be a sucker: buy Bitcoin". This is also pretty bad.
Maybe jumping right to "let's ban all advertising" isn't the right way to start this conversation. Fair enough. But I do think we're starting to come around to the notion that advertising as we know it today isn't a good idea and we should do something about it.
I think the aggregate is one thing, the other is that it's _much_ simpler dealing with one or 100 advertisers (or a network or three) to monetize than it is dealing with thousands or millions of users, facilitating payments, dealing with charge-backs, storing sensitive data etc. I can start a blog today and slap ads on it, it's easy. Doing the same and having to offer the full option to opt-out for payment is months of work.
Not to mention the interesting question of what happens if you're just starting out and you aren't making FAANG-levels of money yet? Is your content free? Should there be some big pool where this is being paid out of?
Germany has VG-Wort, which is private entity that collectively handles licensing-payments for authors. If you sell a printer, you could potentially print out copyrighted materials with it, so the law demands you to pay them some tiny amount for the possible infraction, and they will distribute it among their members according to the type and reach of their texts. That could work, but it doesn't make things simple.
Then there's things like content-pass which offer this model. They are integrated into the GDPR-consent, and you can pay 2.99 (or so) a month to bypass ads & tracking on sites that use it. I work in affiliation, and everyone I know who uses it only does so because it's a convenient way to enforce consent on GDPR banners because you're technically offering an alternative. If lots of people were to go that route, they'd have to increase the monthly price to make it unattractive. I know one site who built it themselves and set the price to $99/m, and had some stressful evenings when they actually got a person to buy to it, because they didn't consider that someone would. That person is still paying for their content as far as I'm aware.
The media-consumption-increase incentive you mention is definitely a problem - but is it new? I'm not sure. Even if you pay for a magazine which has no ads (I do!), if they are driven by commercial interest (the one I subscribe to isn't really), they'll try to make sure that you're deriving as much value from it as possible so you don't question your subscription - and the best way to ensure that is probably to make sure you read it front to back. At the same time, if you read it front to back, it did give you something, right?
I definitely see the point with Youtube & similar where they might figure out the minimum quality required for you to keep watching and aim barely above it, never really satisfying you, but keeping you entertained just enough so you don't leave. In the end, I think you'd still derive value from it, or you'd quit it - even if that value is small -- an sometimes, someone's life might leave them in a place where mindless distraction is valuable enough to them.
> There is no real regulation of this either; companies can spend as much money as they want literally blanketing our buildings, skies, cars, and media broadly with their message
Why don't they? If it was a clear way into peoples minds, I'm sure they would. But maybe it's more of a sustainability issue -- if you overdo, you'll turn people away (who wants to go into an inner city where you're screamed at from all sides?), if you underdo it, you're not maximizing your messaging potential. So I'm not sure they can increase it without limit - not to mention that they'd need to pay _a lot_, and there's no guarantee they'd make that money back.
> But I do think we're starting to come around to the notion that advertising as we know it today isn't a good idea and we should do something about it.
Maybe, I'm not sure. I'm probably less affected by it than most, because I do use an adblocker, I do use sponsorblock, and I avoid places where ads make economic sense (lots of people to see them). I'm probably still getting some of it, but I'm largely not being targeted because I'm part of very small subset of the population that is weird and there's much more to gain from targeting the rest.
Ultimately, the line between product information (30 years ago the ads in an IT magazine I read were often just price lists of available products; very useful to me, but undoubtedly an ad) and advertisements is very fuzzy. I think you'd have a much easier time regulating away unwanted behaviors in ads like we do for some industries (e.g. pharma, or finance, you can't imply that there's no risk), which doesn't automatically kill the useful bits but can still curtail the unwanted stuff.
Ultimately, limiting screen time for children and others who find themselves unable to control their use is probably more helpful, because most ads today are on screens. Who sees those billboards while staring at the cell phone?
In practical terms there isn't an alternative. Sure there are websites without ads, but they won't tell me about what happens in my community. Sure, I could go to the town hall and watch sessions, but it's not practical.
Also: Even alternatives to YouTube will end up in the ad market. Just see the different streaming services where one already pays and who are rolling out ads. And well, YouTube still is the central place with all the videos. The only choice I have is using an ad blocker, which could be seen as amoral.
I hate ads as much as anyone (full disclosure, I use an ad blocker), but with all due respect, the reason there is no “practical” alternative to a service displaying ads is – someone has to pay for it. And before you say “I am paying or I am willing to pay”, it often costs more than you are willing to pay to run these services.
When you say it is “not practical” to go to the town hall, what you are really saying is “my time is valuable and I want someone else to expend their valuable time recording that information and disseminating it to me at low or no cost to me”. Believe me, I understand the desire. But if we were all honest, someone has to pay for this and capitalism has decided that this is the “best” way to do that.
Of course, but there are other ways to finance the news site. But ads are easy and lucrative, thus nobody (with exceptions) bothers to implement them. It's even worse: I pay for my local newspaper subscription and they still serve tracking ads.
Plutonium is scarce. Demand for that plutonium is endless. Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely (vs just regulating with guardrails). Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity. Instead of something that attempts to land on fairness (even if imperfect), no market at all guarantees unfairness.
The black market puts a price on the scarce commodity of plutonium in broad strokes, and it not always, but generally trends toward making the highest purity plutonium for both the bombed and bomber get used over lower purity plutonium in any given situation (because those are the ones who are winning the nuclear war with said plutonium). I know, please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes.
Like all markets, we should regulate plutonium to ensure it doesn’t get out of control. But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all weapons at all levels of society.
Hence why this is a non-serious, silly idea.
Plutonium is scarce, but demand for it is even more scarce. Hence why most of the plutonium that exists is untapped. It’s not even a functioning market because of this, it requires governments to prop up its production.
Plutonium is one of the most niche things ever. All humans and businesses desire human attention, whereas virtually nobody desires plutonium.
The amount of people who can do anything with it amounts to likely 0.000001% of the population.
Ugh, the point is that your argument "if there's a market for something there's no point banning it" is special pleading for advertising. If you put other powerful things in there (plutonium, human organs) you quickly see this. But, sure, let's do it the boring way.
> Human attention is scarce.
Compared to what? Do you mean limited, highly desired, or what? Also I'd say there's 8 billion human attentions. That doesn't sound scarce to me.
> Demand for that attention is endless.
"Endless"? Surely not. What if I have it all?
> Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default
Doesn't this mean almost everything we care about is a market? The supply of almost everything (actually everything?) is limited, qed right?
> meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely (vs just regulating with guardrails).
I don't think this means anything. What's an example of using brutal authoritarianism to disrupt other markets?Cocaine? Human organs?
> Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the decentralized market regulation of that scarcity.
Again if there are any concrete examples I would imagine most people would agree that stuff should be banned.
> Instead of something that attempts to land on fairness (even if imperfect), no market at all guarantees unfairness.
Wait I thought scarcity + demand poofs a market, how can there be scarcity + demand and no market? Isn't this the foundation of your argument?
> Advertising puts a price on the scarce commodity of attention in broad strokes,
The strokes are way too broad. If you're a magazine or a road sign, you're selling the slice of attention you're getting, which isn't anywhere near the whole attention market. Even if you're something like FB or TikTok, you're max getting like 70% of someone's attention. But then is influencer placement more effective than movie product placement? What about an interstitial ad? Blah blah blah. What happens when people are offline, like making breakfast or reading a book (things lots of people still do, believe it or not). This is a market in such a loose sense it loses meaning, but the worst part is the people who own attention aren't getting paid! At least in a human organ market I get cash for my kidneys. Where's the site I can go to where I just watch ads and rack up sweet cheddar?
> and it not always, but generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising).
"Value" for who? You've done no work to establish the value of advertising to the audience. Again, less of a market and more of a sheep shearing operation.
> But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
You might be surprised to learn there's a pretty rich diversity of advertising bans. Here in The Hague we ban ads for meat and fossil fuels. Things are still OK!
> Advertising puts a price on the scarce commodity of attention
Why should I be allowed to sell my attention any more than I can sell my own kidneys? It's even worse because I let other people sell my attention for me and get nothing back. What point are you trying to make? The market for manipulating my behaviour shouldn't exist at all so I really don't care how efficient it is
> the highest value messages for both the audience..
Obviously not. If this was true then people would pay to see more ads and everyone knows that doesn't happen
> Out of all of HN’s biases, the violent hatred of advertising is by far one of the most misguided.
Interesting, I perceive it exactly the other way around. I'm surprised this thread is as high up as it is, usually as per my perception, anti-advertisement sentiment gets shot down hard, presumably because a large part of the HN-crowd works for companies like google or facebook which rely on ads as a business model, or start-ups whose products are only used because users were shown ads for them.
My take: The human mind is hackable; it's just too easy and efficient to appeal to our emotions and most basic instincts. And while it was mostly fine to ignore it while it was "only" increasing consumerism, we currently see what happens when the same is applied to elections, with predictably terrible outcomes.
Your stance is still the old HN stance; the market actually works, any change that would impact the status quo is neither welcome nor needed, etc. etc. - this was the gospel for at least a decade, but we're finally awakening to the fact that hey, maybe this is actually bad, even if it made loads of money for many of us. Maybe it led us to the awful situation we're currently in, with big, ad-based monopolies, an absolute clownshow in the highest of offices and CEOs of said monopolies playing the lackeys.
Most big social developments in human history were non-serious and silly to many people before they actually happened.
I don't know if I go that far. I can see arguments for both sides of the issue. And at the same time, I know it would be impossible to do, but I could see that not having advertising would fix a lot of problems in our society. And yes, advertising is a broad term. Maybe we have clear rules around what's advertising and what's propaganda.
There are forms of advertising which are consensual - someone who buys a copy of Vogue presumably does so because they want to see the products being advertised - but the advertising I would ban is that which responds to the demand for attention by flat-out stealing it. If it's not consensual, it should not be legal.
> you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely
I'm not usually a fan of brutal authoritarianism, but you're making it sound pretty good.
<< the violent hatred of advertising is by far one of the most misguided.
I am willing to give you that there is hatred. I don't know if it is violent, but there is actual hatred. I do not believe it is misguided. As the OP mentions, a lot of people on this site saw how the sausage is made.
<< Human attention is scarce.
True, but each ad makes it even more scarce as humans instinctively try to filter out noise suggesting that ads do not belong in our vicinity.
<< Demand for that attention is endless.
I disagree, but I do not want to pursue this line of argumentation, because it is a deep rabbit hole with a lot that can trip it ( and I sadly do not have time this Sunday ).
<< meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely
You may be onto something. Current breed of corporations are effectively nation-states that require focus of an entity nearly as singular. Hmm.
<< no market at all guarantees unfairness.
Meh, I saw the fairness and I think I am ok with its absence from the world at large.
<< generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation
Hardly, "make your penis bigger" likely being most obvious example.
<< please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes.
I think you are misunderstanding something. The reason OP even considers such a drastic move is because throwing the baby out with the water is easier than attempt at gentle removal. I will add one more thing though. I was in a meeting with non-technical audience yesterday and, oddly, advertising and face tracking in apps came up. This is all starting to trickle down to regular people, which does suggest some level of correction is coming.
<< we should regulate advertising to ensure it doesn’t get out of control
It is already out of control, but adtech managed to normalize it.
<< But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.
Hardly, maybe you could argue for freedom of association as we are talking mostly third parties, but the business would still be able to huff and puff as much as they want.
> Human attention is scarce. Demand for that attention is endless. Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely
This logic is just bad, plain and simple. You know what else has a high demand? Drugs.
So I guess fuck it, right? Sell heroin in Walmart, who cares. It's a "natural market". Of course people want to shoot up, it feels fucking amazing and humans are hard-wired to do shit that makes them feel good.
So let's just give up and do nothing. Yeah, in fact go ahead and advertise heroin on TVs. Yeah, go ahead and give it to infants too, let's get them young. After all, it's a natural market or something.
Please, I am begging you, stop bending over so severely for "markets". Sit back, and think about consequences.
If something ONLY HARMS PEOPLE, why are we doing it? Seriously, if everyone is a loser then why are we here? We don't have to make life hell just because capitalism would like it! That's a choice!
Economizing is a uniquely human delusion whereby you suddenly think that principles of human centric markets somehow ascend to a primal force of the universe and aren't just a coping mechanism we use to try to peaceably coexist with one another without sinking all our time into killing one another to decrease competition like the rest of the life on the planet.
Nature doesn't do markets. We do. If you apply market thinking to the wrong things, bad things happen. You don't serve the market. The market serves you.
What you can do relatively easily is to control the physical format of advertising. For example, consider how rare "billboards" are outside of the USA. Or towns in various places that prohibit signage that is not in the same plane as the edge of the building (i.e. no sticky-outy signs).
Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge cases that are tricky, but overall the situation doesn't seem too fraught.
You start conservatively, and set up a watchdog to investigate loopholes and punish those abusing them. Fund an astroturfing campaign? Congrats, that's 10 years and a hefty fine to fund the continued operation of the watchdog. You can make promotional material and publish it, but it has to be clearly labeled and opt-in, not bundled with access to something else. The problem isn't small-time promotion that's difficult or impossible to crack down on, it's that we've built a whole attention economy. So long as we make it a bad value proposition for big players we'll have succeeded.
The argument you seem to be proposing applies to any policy whatsoever. "Well, you have to convince people to vote for you and your policies". Ok, sure, that's what's being done.
My point is, that process of convincing is advertising.
So they'll only ban non-political advertising... until they decide your movement isn't political for the purposes of the laws. It's too obvious, and too tempting, a cudgel for any government to have.
Political messaging is more than TV ads and mailers. There are rallies, online groups, town halls, organizing, basic human communication stuff.
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The way we reign in government isn't by having no rules (the argument you're making reduces to "any rule can be weaponized against political opposition"), it's political checks to ensure weaponization doesn't happen. Or put another way, there is no system of rules that constrains a regime defined by its rule breaking.
That's likely to be the case anyway, because politicians are rarely willing to restrict themselves. The US Do Not Call list has an exception for political spam.
(See also: why the two biggest political parties are unlikely to support better voting systems.)
There are other (democratic) countries with restriction on political ads. For the ruling party it isn't as bad as they got other means (official government communication etc.) while advertising is mostly needed as a tool for the opposition for being able to bring topics on the agenda.
The United States government is not allowed to regulate commerce unless it is interstate. So it defined interstate commerce as anything that substantially affects interstate commerce. Did you cut down a tree in your backyard and use it to make your own pencil with your own labor? That kept you from buying a pencil that might have been made in another state. Interstate commerce.
Did you just represent an idea, and did I pay you with my attention? Advertising. Prison.
You are being needlessly obtuse. If you are not going to at least pretend to be acting in good faith, then you just shouldn't comment at all.
> The United States government is not allowed to regulate commerce unless it is interstate
This isn't true even in the slightest. You are thinking of the Commerce Clause (Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution), which states that Congress has the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, between states, and with tribes (which are kinda foreign nations).
This does not state that the Federal Government cannot define what is legal and illegal. This is done pretty regularly. 24 states have legalized weed and 39 have made it available for medical use, YET it is still illegal under federal ruling and these dispensaries get raided by Federal Agents routinely. There is no violation of the Constitution here.
And remember, law doesn't work like code. It needs to be interpreted with intent. The letter of the law is imprecise and is not meant to be absolute. If you know what someone means, don't derail the conversation as if you have a gotcha. You're welcome to request better language, but you don't "win" by misrepresenting what is well understood. We're trying to communicate, not exploit software.
> 24 states have legalized weed and 39 have made it available for medical use, YET it is still illegal under federal ruling.
Congress at least has to pretend it has enumerated powers and is using them, most of the time, "promote the general welfare" notwithstanding. So do you know the basis for that federal "ruling"? Smoking weed, including weed grown in your backyard, substantially affects interstate commerce.
> And remember, law doesn't work like code. It needs to be interpreted with intent.
Is this not my point rather than yours? Open the door for ill intent and the imprecise nature of the law means that the first people with ill intent will exploit it.
"Congress shall make no law" is not a rule we can use for absolutely everything, of course, but where it does not exist, Congress historically shall pretty much inevitably make a law. So the answer to "is my unpopular speech advertising if adverting can be regulated?" is "yes." Of course it will be regulated. Others have pointed out that this applies to lots of laws, not just speech, to which I say... yeah?
Is that supposed to be a gotcha? You campaign. Talk to people, spread your message. You don't buy ads, you hold rallies. Encourage supporters to talk to friends and family. Do interviews. Is your idea of political participation limited to purchasing Instagram ads?
This is all very simple to dostinguish: did you pay or have any other kind of contract with the person talking about you/your product? Then it's an ad, and could be made illegal. Are you just talking to people and hoping you'll convince them to talk to others in turn? Free speech, perfectly fine.
If I'm in green tech can I set up a charity whose goal is to raise awareness of the problems of climate change and what we can do to fight it? I'll claim that I really care about it and that's why I'm in the solar business in the first place.
I mean… that means you can’t hire people to get signatures for petitions for the very thing you’re trying to get passed. I think their point is pretty fair.
Money for advertising is already a super sized network effect, making it difficult to challenge incumbents unless you're already rich,
Look, it's a radical idea and on its face, all at once, is impractical at the moment. So I suggest rather than pointing out the myriad of holes like shooting fish in a barrel, you give it the benefit of the doubt and roll around the ways it could work in your head. And what your online/offline experience would be if it were even 10% effective.
It already is that effective in a lot of the world with stricter advertising laws, and as a Canadian I do find the levels of advertising in the us landscape to be jarring. So there are examples
Money is much easier to combine though. You can convince 1000 people to each donate $100 and now you have a sizeable amount to run a campaign. Convincing _and coordinating_ 1000 people to each talk to five neighbors is _much_ harder, and much less effective since the messaging will be all over the place.
Strict regulation of ads is one thing, outlawing advertising is another. There are places that don't allow billboards and other street-level advertisement, but that's a long way from outlawing advertisements in general.
I get that it's a nice idea to many, but I follow a general rule of adding extra skepticism if the problems of some approach are absolutely obvious and the response to pointing them out is "don't worry about, that'll sort itself out, let's just do it". Especially when the collateral damage might be huge and the energy feels like "this will save us".
Companies holding rallies is fine, as long as people outside the rally, in a public space, are not unwillingly confronted with ads. Organizing flash mobs as a way to do marketing should indeed be illegal if ads themselves are illegal.
All Advertising is Marketing, but not all Marketing is Advertising.
I think the distinction should be thought of as Marketing (not Advertising) is to inform customers that opt-in to the information. Usually, marketing (excluding the Advertising arm) is for the benefit of a willing participant, where-as Advertising is for the benefit of both the willing participant and also the Advertiser (& advertising media) against an unwitting participant/user.
An example could be a product, company, political candidate's website that has a calendar for upcoming events, information pages about the product, etc. This can include tacky graphics and UI/UX, or even strategic language to stand out and show "personality". What it can not have are advertising boxes for unrelated advertising injections that the user did not go to the website to learn about. That would then be a Marketing site with banned Advertisements. The same for the Marketed product, they can not Advertise on unrelated media; basically inserting itself against the users will (the Advertised product being placed/injected/"forced" upon the person/user).
Stop being so pedantic. Everyone knows what the topic is about. "Ban advertising" is the goal and not the policy itself. Start with the obvious and unambiguous examples if you still want to act like this. Do you still disagree?
It's all about scale, really. In France advertising for political parties is very restricted. We don't get to endure the kind of insane propaganda Americans have.
How exactly does it work in other countries but the US?
There's very little outside advertising in Sweden, for example, and mostly restricted to cultural advertising. Road shoulders belong to Traffic Authority, and all advertising and billboards are banned there, so you won't see the insanity pf billboard after billboard here.
So how did Sweden do that? By political will and persuasion perhaps?
Political advertising also adheres to certain rules. And while there's a lot of it in a few months before elections, it's still surprisingly contained compared to some countries
In the UK there’s a lot of screens on pedestrian walkways, and small adverts on roundabouts but very few motorway (highway) adverts.
On the motorway there’s signs for services (rest stops) with all the major brands logos on, and maybe one or two billboards every 30 / 40 miles outside of city centres, then more as you come into a city centre.
I’ve also recently noticed a massive vertical screen on the side of a building near a busy interchange in my city (Manchester).
Public transport is littered with small adverts - on underground’s / metros there’s a lot of posters on escalators and buses have a lot inside, plus usually a big banner on the side (or a full skin of the bus but they’re fairly rare at least in my city).
Political advertising is capped at £20 million per party, but our newspapers do most of the real political propaganda come election time in terms of what stories they cover / who they endorse in their editorials (or sometimes they allow a major candidate to write one). The BBC also lets all parties with some traction do a 5 minute party political broadcast.
When I’ve watched some live US TV channels I’ve been amazed by how many “Vote X for Y, paid for by Z PAC” adverts there are and am thankful UK parties can’t spend anywhere near the same amount.
Billboards being rare outside of the US seems quite incorrect. The developing world is full of billboards, and places in Europe like Milan have some wild Samsung billboards.
Anecdote: If you are driving through Canada and start seeing billboards beside the highway, you are very likely crossing a native reservation. Billboards are generally banned but native communities have more direct control over their own land use and so regularly operate billboards.
(Billboards also also reasonably good as sound reflectors, reducing the highway noise in the community if positioned properly.)
The UK, outside of cities is largely devoid of bill boards a la the US. Milan is not "Europe" either!
I have driven/travelled across a lot, nearly all, European countries and the other one - the UK.
You do not get those huge screens on stilts anywhere that I have seen in Europe, that seem to be common across the US.
To be fair, I've only driven across about 10 US states. However, I do have Holywood's and other's output to act as a proxy and it seems that US companies do love to shout it from the hill tops at vast expense and fuck up the scenery with those bill board thingies.
Try driving around La Toscana and say Florida. I've done both, multiple times and I'm a proper outsider. I love both regions quite passionately but for very different reasons. FL has way more issues in my opinion but we are discussing bill boards so let's stay on task.
Billboards require power as well as the obvious physical attributes. They are an absolute eyesore and in my opinion should be abolished. Turn them into wind turbines and do some good - the basics are in place.
However. I know FL quite well. It has a lovely climate (unless it is trying to kill you). Florida man almost certainly invented air conditioning and FL man being FL man took it to the max when confronted with a rather lovely climate.
FL man is a thing and it turns out that CA Pres. can be weirder than anything seen before.
US - remember your mates, we remember you as is and don't hold you accountable for going a bit odder than usual for a while.
> I do have Holywood's ... output to act as a proxy and it seems that US companies do love to shout it from the hill tops at vast expense and fuck up the scenery with those bill board thingies.
This reminded me of learning the Hollywood sign was literally an advertisement (shouted from the hill top) that turned into a cultural landmark
On to the point for the topic, parts of Asia (mid/large cities) are overwhelming with their advertisements which I don't think the US or EU/UK can compare either
My first thoughts: You might be able to make those bill boards synonymous with imperialism of some sort. That gets you loads of negative connotations for free.
Digital billboards, sure, but traditional static billboards only need power if you want to light them at night. My guess is the majority of billboards in the US are unpowered, since it's so much cheaper. (Though likely not the majority if you weight by daily views.)
In Amsterdam there are posters at bus stops, roughly similar-sized billboards by the side of the road, some of them are video screens. There are video screens at train stations at well. At busy highway interchanges there are towers with billboards on top, strongly lit at night. It may not be as bad as in the US but there is advertising like this in most major cities in Europe.
I'm not sure what your argument is. I thought it was "they've done illegal things before", to which I'd say "backroom dealings aren't the same as a huge sign basically saying 'look at me breaking the law over here'", but that's so trivially obvious that I'm sure your argument can't be that.
That is requiring advertisers to set the HTTP evil bit. If advertising is fine, they're happy to make it obvious that something is an ad. If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement. I'd be surprised if banning billboards caused advertising budgets to drop.
Are they happy? They resist any legislation to label things as ads and want them as unobtrusive as possible. They take over the platforms while there’s still astroturfing and sponsored content charading as regular content.
If we ban billboards at least the the countryside will look nice
> If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement.
Advertising already makes extensive use of astroturf campaigns and product placement.
Cable TV started out with no ads, as a major selling point over broadcast TV. Then they started advertising because they figured they could make more money that way. There's no reason to believe that advertisers will ever refrain from introducing ads when there's money to be made by doing so.
In theory, anyway, billboards are prevalent sans regulation because they’re (among) the most efficient forms of advertising. That is, if the advertisers would only be spending some money on astroturf campaigns and product placement instead of billboards, it must be because they’re less effective than billboards - otherwise they’d just put that money towards the astroturf campaigns and product placement in the first place.
So banning billboards makes advertising less efficient. In theory, anyway.
If you step on a nail you'll be less efficient at walking for a bit. Causing random harm to people isn't really the basis for a reasonable system of rules. The regulators could cause random harm to advertisers. Society can cause random harm to anyone. You're not going to make consumers (or anyone else, for that matter) better off.
I'd much rather be fed efficient advertising on a billboard than have to worry about more astroturfing, that stuff is insidious. Cure substantially worse than the disease once advertisers have to deceptive and have even bigger incentives to hide than they already do.
And much as the anti-ads people want to skip the point, nobody ever even established that advertising is a negative thing that advertisers need to be harmed for.
Oh really? We banned billboards here in Maine in 1978ish, and you know what we don't have? Insane attempts to get around the law! There's an occasional person hired by a shady political organization to drive a couple trucks with signs on them around, but that's already not allowed by the law, it's just poorly enforced, and it's very rare.
Agree, that'd totally work - things like "billboards" or "ads on public transport" are possible to define and regulate. Advertising on the web would be much harder, I'd like to hear a good proposed rule on that.
Sadly, a post titled "A proposal to restrict certain forms of advertizing", and full of boring rules will be much less likely to get 800+ points on HN.
something like 80+ percent of texas cities ban them or are phasing them out with heavy new restrictions.
for example, in dallas, if you want a new billboard, you have to tear down 3. and new ones have placement and size restrictions.
houston is no longer allowing any new off premises signage including billboards. the only way to erect a new billboard is if it passes permitting and the company tears down one of their old ones.
and like i said, like 80% of texas towns across the state have heavy restrictions on new or outright ban them.
santa fe effectively has a ban on all off premises advertising which obviously includes billboards.
billboard are banned on highways in the entire country of Norway, including urban/suburban highways.
I've seen Billboards in Honolulu, Houston, Dallas, and Washington DC within the past 2 years. I haven't been to Santa Fe recently but they had billboards the last time I was there.
There are many smaller billboards visible when you use Street View in Google maps. Sao Paulo may have fewer billboards, and no large billboards, but it still has billboards.
How can you say this about my experience? For example, in Wood Green, North London, I can only remember seeing a single billboard, on the side of an off-license. Where have you lived where they are all around the place?
I detest a lot of modern forms of advertising as much as the next guy, but at the same time I think we'd be choking off a lot of interesting and enriching human expression by trying to remove it entirely.
I find it super interesting reading about goat and human sacrifices done by past cultures. It was a genuinely fascinating part of human culture, that humans thought that could help appease the gods to fix the weather, etc.
Just because it was done in the past, and is interesting to learn about, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t outright ban it.
That’s exactly right. Even if ad banning isn’t 100% doable, we’d be better off with it done 80%.
All-or-nothing thinking is so common in HN that it’s seriously over-complicating simple problems by trying to find a perfect solution. Such an ideal solution is rarely necessary.
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?
Seems you're insistent on letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is precisely why judges exist. It would not be difficult to define Ads well enough to cover 99% of current advertising. Sure there will be gray areas. Advertisers will adapt. But it would make it profoundly more expensive, difficult and risky.
I'm not sure I understand a concrete economic argument other than "anything which makes it harder for businesses to be wildly profitable off minimal value hurts the economy". But that only really holds of you define the economy by things like GDP, which really just capture how wildly profitable companies are and have almost no bearing on quality of life for the people; in other words, the argument is circular.
The author specifically mentioned paid 3rd party. So an individual/business can “advertise” all they want for their services, but paying other entities to “speak” for them is not allowed.
Yes, i can find all kinds of loopholes too. Thats what judges are for.
Assume paying for others to advertise for you is illegal. What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right?
What about them wearing a sign so they don’t have to shout? Driving with a sign on a car?
Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that.
How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line?
I am not an advertising apologist. I hate ads with the power of a thousand suns. I use an ad blocker. But this idea of making advertising illegal is just a non-starter. It goes against the basic tenants of freedom of speech.
Practically speaking, 99% of advertising is covered by a dozen or two primary channels which are obnoxious and ubiquitous. The goal should be to regulate platform-ads, e.g. print, billboards, TV, radio, web, streaming, social media. Ads are all already clearly regulated within the limits of freedom of speech, such as criminalizing false advertising, as another comment has pointed out. These platforms are also generally regulated for obscenity, harassment, etc., which if anything are much more subjective than commercial activity.
> What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right?
That is (or should be) prevented by laws against disturbing the peace or similar. Which is more along the lines of reasonable solutions in general. Banning advertising wholesale seems impossible, yes, but regulating the actual most common mechanisms of selling ad spots is much easier.
> Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that.
You're paying somebody for the distribution of the ad embedded within/alongside content (websites) you don't own.
> How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line?
Posting on Facebook is clearly distinct from paying Facebook to promote your ads.
I haven't thought hard about this, but I think the solution relies on some definition of a 'platform' or a similar idea. I think most people could see a difference between the carsigns and the websongs, where the latter look like ads because they're on someone else's platform.
I think we can narrow down on weird cases in between the carsigns and the websongs. Maybe the line gets muddier if the employees aren't driving their own cars with signs, or if those employees are hired to do nothing but drive, or if they're not even employees and they're Uber drivers but for driving signs... To me, that last one sounds like a platform which exists for nothing but advertising.
> this idea of making advertising illegal is just a non-starter. It goes against the basic tenants of freedom of speech.
FWIW, that’s not entirely accurate. The tenets of free speech include a long list of exceptions. In the US, commercial speech and specifically advertisements do not necessarily have free speech protections, by design, especially when it comes to false advertising, misleading advertising, and anything else ads might have that is on the list of exceptions including IP, defamation, and false statements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
>I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable. It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?
No ads in TV programming. No product placement in movies. No billboards. No subway or bus station advertising posters. No paid recommending of specific products. No promotional material for products - nothing with fictional elements. No web ads. No sponsored links. No social media ads. No paid reviews.
(you could still do some of those covertly, with "under the table" money, but then if you caught you get fined or go to jail)
No tracking consuming preferences of any kind, not even if you have an online store. Just a database of past purchases on your own store - and using them for profiling via ML should be illegal too.
If people want to find out about a product, they can see it on your company's website (seeking it directly), or get a leaflet from you. In either case no dramatized / finctional / aspirational images or video should be shown.
>And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
Are products allowed to have labels? Am I allowed to tell my friends I like a product? What if I put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it?
Last time I checked, a product label (on the product or on the package) is not an advertisement. It's just the name of the product and/or brand, and maybe some lines about what it does. Even if you call a product label "a sort of an advertisment" it's fine.
When people complain about advertising today, do they refer to product labels? Or to their friends telling them about a product? If not, why are you bringing this up?
>Am I allowed to tell my friends I like a product? What if I put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it?
Sure, as long as you aren't getting paid for doing it (directly or via affiliate kickbacks). If you are, and you're discovered, you pay a fine - or go to jail.
You try to paint a "it's impossible" all or nothing scenario around marginal advertising and edge cases. Doesn't matter. If we can get rid of 90% of overt advertising - tv ads, streaming ads, posters, billboads, radio jingles, that's enough, even if "you put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it".
Many complex problems can become easier if we can accept that the solutions can be malleable and designed to adapt. We just don’t really apply that to laws for the most part.
I don’t know if it’s America or tech people but online discourse of legal systems from American tech people seems to treat laws as code, something to interpret as written rather than the meaning. Loopholes are celebrated as being clever and are impossible to patch. This is quite alien to most of the world.
Although it should be said the economic success of the Americans hitherto is also quite foreign to the rest of the world; and driven mainly by their legal quirks.
That seems rather focused on one policy that was big in the 50s. The Marshal Plan was great but that isn't something the modern US seems to be capable of - since around Vietnam I think was the change. It has been a good 50 years where the US just breaks stuff and leaves it broken.
Modern prosperity is caused by modern policy. I've seen some reasonable theorising that income basically comes from how easy it is to do business (thinking especially of https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation). Which is linked in no small way to the cultural factors
chgs pointed out - the most vibrant and high income industry in the world is also the one that sees laws impeding them as a problem that can be overcome.
The attitude of doing things that create wealthy even if NIMBYs object is an attitude that leads to wealth creation. Strange but true. Not the only factor, the political strength of the opposition matters a lot too.
The book Why Nations Fail makes a pretty strong argument for the core feature of successful societies to be strong institutions with low perceived corruption. Sensible laws that are upheld equally are a part of that.
The US in particular benefits from an absurd amount of resources (not least of which is land), a perfectly safe geographic position, the global language and an immigrant culture. Basically able to coattail the British after independence, the destruction of much of Eurasia during WWII cemented its position as first. And great diplomacy, including the Marshal Plan, enabled the US to create an international system with many benefits and natural synergies with its inherent strengths.
Legalities don't drive profits. If anything the US was simply lucky in thr 50s to not be war torn and rebuilding it's cities post war.
The only thing special is our geography and history. It's really hard to launch an attack unless you're in Canada and Mexico. So the US smartly made treaties and agreeemtns instead of repeating the bloody history Asia and the now EU went through as they constantly battled neighbors.
Only Australia has such a similar advantage and instead they had to war with nature's deadliest critters trying to kill them (they arguably lost).
I'm a bit stumped that you don't consider treaties and agreements to be legalities.
I mean sure, in the 50s the main driver of prosperity was whether a country had avoided being invaded and that isn't necessarily a result of a country's legal system. But the 50s was a very long time ago now and the era since then has been quite equal-opportunity outside pockets of disaster in Africa and the Middle East. The USSR, Chinese, Euro and US experiences haven't been determined by external factors or historical determinism as much as internal policy choices made in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s with a 20-30 year lag before the decisions start to turn up in real life.
Even if we indulge in wild conspiracy and pretend there is a shadowy cabal in Washington that decided to crush the USSR and exalt China economically, that cabal would have had to implement its decisions by somehow guiding internal policy choices in the respective nations. Nobody has managed to do anything to either of them through external pressure that holds a candle to the internal choices made.
But how do you define advertising. What about social media influencers? How to prevent someone from paying people to promote stuff? What if it is forbidden and then only a bad government can promote their agenda, but anyone else cannot.
We don't define advertising, we describe the sorts of things we would like to see go away, enumerate some of the easiest (like billboards), and amend in the future as newer manifestations become clear.
This isn't some piece of rigidly-defined software instruction that also is somehow write-once execute-forever amend-never.
One would never reach zero. And it would be challenging both to define and police laws against advertising. But to get to a world with drastically less advertisements than today seems doable.
So we want the government to decide what is advertising and propaganda? Is telling people about the wrongs of government propaganda? Is going door to door about have you made Jesus the head of your life propaganda?
The point is that advertising and propaganda are indistinguishable. Going door-to-door to talk about Jesus is the same as going door-to-door to talk about vacuums, but neither is anything like roadside billboards or programmatic advertising. We can ditch the billboards and the programmatic advertising and get a better world, even if some advertisers and propagandists still go door-to-door. At least when it’s door-to-door the advertiser/propagandist has to really work for it, and you have the option of just not opening the door.
If I publish a website of my views, do I have to publish opposing views? Do religious channels and sites have to publish pro choice opinions? Do you have to publish opposing views about vaccines that they cause autism? Do you also have to give equal time to people who believe the “election was stolen”?
So now you’re okay with the government telling every single publisher that they must publish content they don’t agree with?
The Fairness Doctrine was only for broadcast TV under the theory that the people owned the airwaves. Also this is not 1980. Anyone can get worldwide distribution of their ideas out.
If I have to seek it out, say a product catalog or a website, it really isn't marketing or advertising.
The "problem" is that everything is vying for our attention because the internet made it vastly cheaper for any random joe blow to force a set of pixels in front of our faces.
That's the distinction. If I can't ignore it, then it shouldn't be legal. Companies should have no right to my attention.
Yeah? The government defines what is murder, defines what is tax evasion, and defines tons of other stuff already? Some states already have laws against billboards?
How would you like the government deciding some cause they didn’t agree with is advertising?
If you live in a conservative state, what are the chances that they say advocacy for Planned Parenthood is advertising and say that advocacy for pro-life is freedom of religion?
And how would that work over the Internet? Are you going to block foreign websites?
I can give you a real world example. Florida requires age verification for porn sites. Sites not based in the US including the ones owned by MindGeek just ignored it.
> If you live in a conservative state, what are the chances that they say advocacy for Planned Parenthood is advertising and say that advocacy for pro-life is freedom of religion?
A nonsensical argument. You might as well ask how "Oh yeah, you want to ban murder? Well how would you like it if conservative states say that abortion is murder, and killing negroes isn't? Clearly outlawing murder is unworkable."
Great job pointing out that laws can be misinterpreted by motivated judges, I guess we should get rid of all the laws then to make sure that doesn't happen.
Whether I commit murder is objective. Speech is always subjective.
Even if abortion is murder is objective based on the state laws. We see right now how government controlling speech that it doesn’t like is harmful.
Again I’m amazed that people want to give the government more power unnecessarily seeing the current abuses of power and how it is used to punish people the government doesn’t like.
We should limit the power of the government to only punishing things that infringe on our rights and our person.
There are many different ways humans can die and many different types of human involvement in sequence of events. This involvement is sometimes characterized as a causal contributor to death. Responsibility in a related death, is not objective. You are simply incorrect.
>Again I’m amazed that people want to give the government more power
I'm amazed people pretend like corporations having immense power isn't a problem at all. I want the government to reduce the power of corporations to invasively and pervasively manipulate me through intrusive advertisements.
I mean, roe v wade clearly shows it is not objective at all. There's always edge cases in life. Abortion aside, also consider the context of self defense vs. Meditated murder with a plan to hide the body.
>Again I’m amazed that people want to give the government more power unnecessarily s
Well we've done a horrible job self-regulating. This abuse of power also teaches us that ideas without enforcement is just daydreaming. If that all you wanted to do in this article, go ahead.
So you put American companies at a disadvantage and that means companies could just advertise on foreign websites. Are you going to block those websites? Again we see it happening today, the American porn websites are losing money to foreign websites owned by MindGeek.
Why wouldn’t the same happen to more mainstream sites.
Do we also ban Netflix and other streaming services from having an ad tier? Do we make all search engines and other content providers for pay?
How do broadcast companies make money without advertising? Do we want the government funding and controlling content?
American websites implement GDPR even though that's an EU law. Websites that are used across geopolitical boundaries will invariably follow US law. There will certainly be a few exceptions, but if the law is written like the GDPR, then they'd be illegally violating the law.
And services like Netflix losing an ad supported tier is just like... Netflix in 2021. I fail to see that as alarming.
And how does broadcast Tv work in your no ad supported TV world? Would everyone have to pay for Google for search? Could you not get any news if you couldn’t pay for it?
Websites that do not have any European presence could care less about EU law. I just gave a real world example of what’s going on in the US right now. Florida has a law that says porn sites must have age verification. Xvideos completely ignores the law.
But back to Google, if it weren’t ad supported, does that mean minors couldn’t use it or the poor? Right now, poor and even homeless people can get smart phones for free with data (or use WiFi) from the government.
Would people he don’t have home internet access who can now go to the library not use Google if they don’t pay for it?
Are you familiar with broadcast TV that is supported by "viewers like you"? And historically TV advertising was banned until the FCC allowed it. And you do realize that news used to be paid? You'd be surprised that... people used read the newspaper with their morning breakfast, which cost a few cents and was delivered by a paperboy.
Really, you're trying to imply that society wouldn't function without advertising- when it was the default until the last 100 years or so. Perhaps you should watch Mad Men on HBO, which depicts the 1960s era when sociopaths of the advertising industry decided to redefine advertising as a necessity of modern living.
> Right now, poor and even homeless people can get smart phones for free with data (or use WiFi) from the government.
If the government is willing to subsidize Google Android phones running on a network like AT&T or T-Mobile for poor people... what's to stop the government from also subsidizing Google Search for poor people as well? It's not like Google's gonna care much about poor people, people who are that poor tend not to be good advertising targets anyways. The juicy ad market is elsewhere. Similarly, have you gone to any library recently? Libraries already offer stuff like access to a NYTimes or WSJ subscription, or even things like LinkedIn Learning. Adding Google to the list as another subscription that they offer to library card holders for free is a nonissue.
Honestly, it just sounds like you've been brainwashed into being unable to visualize a society without advertising.
Frankly, nobody gives a shit if EU or whatever websites continue to do their thing. US porn sites have negative political capital anyways, XVideos continuing operate as before impacting the US porn industry would make any hypothetical law EASIER to pass, not more difficult.
> Are you familiar with broadcast TV that is supported by viewers like you.
I’m old enough to know that even in the 80s Mr. Rogers was in front of congress asking the government not to cut funding because some conservative congressmen were opposed to some of the content.
And the actual phrase was “… and viewers like you”
PBS always had corporate “sponsors” they announced during pre or post show credits just like NPR does today. Corporate “sponsors” are just advertisers by a different name.
How do you think the current administration would think about PBS supporting gay pride month or Black history month? Would the current government help fund HBCU libraries or would they come under their “anti DEI” crusade?
> And historically TV advertising was banned until the FCC allowed it
This is not true. The earliest TV and radio broadcasting companies were advertising supported.
> You'd be surprised that... people used read the newspaper with their morning breakfast, which cost a few cents and was delivered by a paperboy.
And those papers still had advertising. The subscriptions never paid the total cost of newspaper publications
> when it was the default until the last 100 years or so
Coca Cola has been big in advertising since it was first incorporated in 1880s. Are you saying there was no advertising 100 years ago on media that didn’t exist like the radio, TV and internet?
> what's to stop the government from also subsidizing Google Search for poor people as well
You mean the same government today that is rewriting history, purging government websites and has a list of words that agencies can’t say? You want that government having more control of private speech? Or would you prefer the last government who also pressured private entities not to publish things that went against the government narrative about Covid? Even though now we know some of the things that they suppressed was true.
I don’t mean the anti-vax stuff. I mean the government wouldn’t admit for the longest that immunity from the vaccine waned and you needed another shot after six months even though other government’s health agencies started recommending them.
> Adding Google to the list as another subscription that they offer to library card holders for free is a nonissue.
And then also those sites that Google is linking to? What are the chances that the government allows libraries to pay for content that the government disagrees with?
Would the current government pay for access to Fox News and The Guardian or just Fox News? Today the government is withholding funding from colleges that don’t toe the line and says things it disagrees with. Oh yeah and deporting protesters who are here legally. This is the government that you want paying for and controlling content?
> Honestly, it just sounds like you've been brainwashed into being unable to visualize a society without advertising.
Well seeing that you are factually wrong about history and ignoring what the government is doing right now when it comes to making sure that only its views are heard….
And I’m bringing up porn because porn websites are regulated today heavily in some states and one of the most popular sites overall which is not hosted in the US is completely ignoring it.
As far as sites with negative capital, in todays client, any site that is pro-Palestine, LGBT, minorities, anti Musk/Trump etc not only has negative capital, it’s actually been pressured by the government and news organizations are already capitulating.
> I’m old enough to know that even in the 80s Mr. Rogers was in front of congress asking the government not to cut funding because some conservative congressmen were opposed to some of the content.
Exactly. Congress funding something tends to produce better work than corporate advertising funded stuff. Look at NASA, or national science grants, or Mr Rodgers as a comparison. Subscription funded media and Congress funded media being available, are you seriously saying Marlboro sponsored shows are better as an alternative?
"1941: The FCC lifts its ban on TV advertising, and the first commercial airs"
> And those papers still had advertising. The subscriptions never paid the total cost of newspaper publications
No, that was not the case until the advent of the penny press of the 1830s. Before the 1 cent penny press, standard newspapers cost 6 cents per paper and was not mostly funded by advertising, although they had small amounts of advertisements. They would have survived just fine if advertising was banned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press
"The main revenue for the penny press was advertising while other newspapers relied heavily on high-priced subscriptions to finance their activities."
> 1880s
I would consider that roughly "100 years or so" ago, within the correct amount of sigfigs. It's certainly closer to 100 years ago than 200 years ago. And even if you did bring up examples from 150 or 199 years ago- so what? The point is that advertising started its dominance during this century or so, quibbling over a few decades is pointless.
> You mean the same government today that is rewriting history, purging government websites and has a list of words that agencies can’t say? You want that government having more control of private speech?
Yes. Unashamedly.
Your line of thinking is how we got Citizens United. Your line of thinking is imprudently painting all government action under the same brush, where state propaganda is conflated with things like banning money in politics or banning billboards. Hint: banning advertising looks a lot more like an anti-Citizens United good thing, than some 1984 Ministry of Truth.
> Would the current government pay for access to Fox News and The Guardian or just Fox News?
> you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
I don't see how you reached this conclusion, unless you think advertising/propaganda yields bet positive outcomes more than net negative, which seems contentious.
Here's one way it could be false: the wisdom of the crowds only really works when groups of people independently reach their own conclusions, because people who don't understand an issue are randomly distributed around the correct answer and so they all cancel each other out, leaving only the people who do understand an issue to cluster around the correct decision.
Propaganda/advertising works directly against this, thus undercutting the usefulness of the wisdom of crowds.
I think the article mentions banning “sold advertising”, which seems like a fair way to go about it. You can still advertise your own stuff, but you cannot pay a marketplace to do it for you any more. Advertising would by necessity become a lot more local.
How do those sites make money if advertising doesn’t exist?
A major challenge in journalism is because of the collapse in value of banner ads. No one but the very largest newspapers have sustainable businesses in the United States and they only do because of the critical mass they have reached with subscribers.
I subscribe to a magazine that publishes tests and reviews of everything from lawn fertiliser to spices, via vacuums and mobile phones. It costs money and I trust that they are not bribed.
It seems rather certain an end to advertising would mean the death of lots of low-quality "media".
Good information is valuable. When internet didn’t exist people paid good money for newspaper and magazines because they provided good information which people found valuable.
Do such things exist? I am pretty sure that any review site today has many "inorganic" reviews on them, and products recommended just because vendor paid more.
Or consumers could contribute back to them making them free resources. Remember the early internet? It was free and it had no ads. That until the pop-ups and flashy banner ads showed up murkying the waters. It appears that advertising inherently wants to agressively take all out attention.
You spam forums, send emails and abuse any free resources you can find. If you can find them, that is, because without ad revenue they would be closing pretty quickly.
It'd be a very different world, I anticipate a lot of paywalls and secret deals.
There's two kinds of advertising: your local mom and pop running a labor day sale in the local paper, and megacorps spending billions of dollars advertising soda and roblock lootcrates or whatever to kids, or plastering every square inch of public and private space with maximally attention-seeking posters and billboards.
It’s impossible to live in a world without murder, and murder is difficult to precisely define and identify, and yet neither of those are good reasons to oppose making murder illegal.
Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good. I spent 5+ years living in Hawaii, where just billboards are illegal. I can’t quantify the effect but qualitatively, it’s something I dearly miss in the concrete hell of Southern California.
Almost everyone can tell when they’re being advertised to. And almost everyone can tell when they advertise. Effectiveness of such bans would depend on enforcement, the definition is clear enough.
It really isn't though. There's so many different forms that we can't reduce it to "I know it when I see it" territory and depend on case-by-case enforcement.
Do we ban outdoor billboards? Product placement? Content marketing? Public relations? Sponsor logos on sports uniforms? Brand logos on retail clothing? Mailing lists?
I do love the idea, but doubt its feasibility. Implementation would have to be meticulous, and I expect the advertising industry would always be one step ahead in an endless race of interpretation. We can still try to curtail the most disruptive forms though, we don't have to destroy all advertising at once to make a positive difference.
I'd say don't let the perfect be the enemy of good. Banning 80% of existing advertisement practices would practically achieve all the goals bans strive for.
You nailed it man. My first response even to the headline let alone the article was to reflect on the first line spoken by my professor in my first marketing class: "Marketing is about educating the consumer." Advertising is just one way we attempt to do that, and taken to an extreme, I have no idea how you could ever make it stop. The article is clearly focused on one part of advertising, but even then, someone will always build a better mousetrap.
You are completely missing (or perhaps reinforcing my point) - billboards? Great, we'll create a fleet of vehicles with mobile advertising on the back. Outlaw that? Great, we'll pay private citizens to put up signs in their yards - can't outlaw freedom of speech after all. It's whack-a-mole.
If advertising "skirts through the loopholes", fine - at least we'll recognise it as underground (like darknet now). The liberal version, I don't even understand how you got there so won't comment. That was wild.
And you seem to ignore the issue the OP mentions about not being able to unilaterally disarm.
It's easy if you try. But you won't try ... what a shame.
How do farmer’s markets run afoul of this proposal? Perhaps there is advertising by the market to tell people to come, that can be eliminated. Once you are at the market there are only individual booths advertising their wares, which is fine because its not a 3rd party.
You don't define "advertising". You look for things that advertisers do and see if they can be made illegal or unprofitable.
Formula 1 cars used to have displays for tobacco products. At one point, the law in Europe started saying "you can not do that", so tobacco advertisements disappeared.
> Advertising is unsolicited content which attempts to trigger or nudge a behaviour.
So I'm listening to the radio, and one minute I'm hearing someone on NPR (or an equivalent public broadcaster) explaining how to make my back healthier; the next minute there's someone trying to convince me that some product will make my back healthier.
Or, instead of trying to decide which speech is good and which is bad, we could let anyone say anything they want, across any medium the cost of which they are willing to bear.
The one where some sort of payment can be demonstrated in court. So quite possibly both if someone at the broadcaster accepted free back care services and decided to produce the story. But yeah, it could get very murky if you go down the rabbit hole and include things like owning shares in a health care provider.
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.
This is just the perfect solution fallacy.
Nobody in this conversation thinks there's a set of laws that would work perfectly to prevent all advertising. That doesn't mean it can't be a hell of a lot better than it is. Playing whack-a-mole with loopholes and making careful regulations to avoid inhibiting human rights is still a huge improvement over letting corporations trample human rights at will.
Even if the authoritarianism to enforce it weren't by itself undesirable, banning advertising creates a situation where incumbents (known names) have a significant advantage over new entrants to a market.
It's worth analyzing why a society wants that and who benefits from it.
>banning advertising creates a situation where incumbents (known names) have a significant advantage over new entrants to a market.
The article almost explicitly states that this is precisely the goal. We all understand who those populists in 2016 are, who "bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences".
So I think we are not talking about authoritarianism here, but full-fledged totalitarianism. Such a policy is a powerful lever of control, allowing government to obtain even more levers. And in the end people still vote "wrongly" (spoiler: they are voting "wrongly" not because of some Russian advertisement on facebook), but the government at that point will not care anymore how people vote because that will not affect anything.
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.
I've been on the advertising, is an evil parasite around useful transactions bandwagon for a while and thought this was really hard to define properly.
So far my best take is around that what's good is being discoverable instead of something that you run into. This allows people to do what they want, without the evil side of unconsciously or in-competitively driving them to your business/deals.
This is a classic case of perfect being the enemy of good.
We don't need to 1984 listen to every conversation for any hints at product endorsement. We can start with obvious things - for example, prohibiting a company from spending money on marketing. Banning ads on the air, whatever.
There's levels to this. There's really evil slot machine marketing. You know, try to get people addicted to your social media and use that addiction as a way to generate profit. And then there's not so bad marketing. Like my friend telling me he likes his new pair of pants.
There is no reason it has to be so immoral, annoying, and evil. There could be a whole gamified system where people who choose to voluntarily participate can find things they want to buy from people eager to sell
I don't know about 'advertising', but Bahai don't allow campaigning when running for leadership position. I would imagine it would be some where along line of that. It encourage action speakers louder than words.
With all the modern techniques (used by neurosciences) in the modern advertising is pretty all entrainment and brain washing at this point any way. So no harm in making all that illegal. I'm pretty ok with a world with no advertising, and just function by word of mouth and network of trust.
What is your evidence that there is any economic advantage at all to have unregulated advertising?
I'm fairly sure advertising is regulated in all sovereign states. And I am also quite certain that the jurisdictions in which gambling advertisement is illegal fare better economically than those in which it is illegal. It only makes sense: gambling is not productive, the less of it you have the better your population spend their money on productive things, the more advertising you have the more people spend on gambling (otherwise what is the point of advertising?), if you forbid gamling advertising there will be less gambling advertising (if not, what is your complaint even?).
Nothing about this statement of yours makes sense.
For the same reason weights and measures legislation is of course impossible.
This is why every time you go to the shops you have to carry your own standard weights and balance scale! The idea that society could regulate the weight and volume of every product in every shop is simply preposterous!
"It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?"
"How do you define it?" is an oft-repeated and weak argument against regulation used by online commenters who likely are defending a self-interest in maintaining tha status quo behaviour of so-called "tech" companies.
Online advertising services are obviously capable of being defined as these are bought by advertisers and sold by so-called "tech" companies every day. These so-called "tech" companies define "products" and "services", offered for "free", all the time. The commercial purpose is facilitation of online advertising. This can be regulated.
Before the internet was opened to the public, commercial use was prohibited. Today, HN commenters would no doubt try to suggest that defining what is and is not "commercial use" would be "impossible". But it's too late. It was already done.
The uncomfortable truth for so-called "tech" companies is that _any_ regulation that affects the ability to collect data, conduct surveillance and assist the injection of advertising into people's "user experience" could have a significant impact on their "business model". Hence they try to argue _any_ regulation is unworkable. All-or-nothing. Perfect, 100% solution or nothing at all.
But regulation does not have to define _all_ advertising. It may only define advertising that meets certain criteria. All-or-nothing thinking is nonsensical in this context. By analogy, when so-called "tech" companies propose alleged "solutions" for privacy issues, do they propose one solution that offers total, complete "privacy". How do we even define "privacy". What they propose is usually some incremental improvement.
It is possible to limit online advertising through rules and regulations. Of course this is a unacceptable proposition for so-called "tech" companies. Their only viable "business model" depends on usurping the bandwidth of internet subscribers for surreptitious, unwanted data collection, real-time surveillance and online advertising.
Amplified messaging from corporations is not the same as the free speech of individuals. Just as we disallow advertising for cigarettes and hard liquor on TV, a democratic society should be free to select other classes of messages that corporations are not permitted to amplify into public spaces.
Hard liquor ads are all over (e.g.) broadcasts of NFL games.
Cigarette advertising “bans” are not legislated, IIRC, but a result of the various consolidated settlements of the 1990s-era lawsuits against the tobacco companies. They’re essentially voluntary, and it’s not obvious that a genuine ban would survive constitutional scrutiny. It might: Commercial speech is among the least protected forms of speech.
But at some point a line is crossed: Painting “Read the New York Times” on the side of a barn you own is bread & butter freedom of expression.
> But at some point a line is crossed: Painting “Read the New York Times” on the side of a barn you own is bread & butter freedom of expression.
Okay, then don't make that illegal.
I don't understand this mentality of "everything is the same as everything else so we can't do anything".
Sure, it's all just scale. But scale matters. Scale is why I can do a science experiment at home and it's cool, but I can't make a nuclear warhead. Seems for just about everything we've been able to find that line and work around it. This "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" approach to society is toxic, and we need to stop.
It doesn't sound nice. It sounds utterly insane and totalitarian.
There is such a disturbing element of society that seems to want to "save democracy" by any means necessary. By "save democracy" they mean get the election results they want, in other words it has nothing at all to do with democracy.
They just want power.
"We should ban advertising so the people I agree with can have absolute power" is really what these insane people are saying.
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes.
It's quite easy though. Just remove incentives to advertise. Remote the possibility of profit. Will it destroy the economy? Of course, but the advertising will cease.
I grew up in a communist country. There was some advertising (in TV, radio, magazines; very little outdoor), but since all the profits went to the state anyway, there was no real competition, and also often shortages, the advertising was not really serious. It didn't influence people a lot. It was harmless.
Of course there was a lot of communist propaganda in the media, in the schools and workplaces, outdoor banners etc., and that is advertising too. But also this was already at the stage when nobody took it seriously anymore.
hey why try to do anything ever, people will just find a way around it and it will be worse than if we did nothing. lets make murder legal, fewer people will get killed i guess
We cant define the beginning and end of human life/consciousness, and we've regulated it for thousands of years. That it is hard to define does not make it impossible to control
>> imagine a world without advertising
> I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?
Yet, in some countries advertising for tobacco or alcohol is banned, if it's possible to ban these advertising for these product why would it be impossible to ban every advertising.
> And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
Uh? You can advertise in these other nation but they also won't be able to advertise in your country, so I don't understand your point.
There was almost no advertising in my country when I was 7. I live in Poland and till 1989 it was communist puppet state of USSR (not through our choice, obviously, so the moment we could - we noped out of it).
There was no point advertising because there was no competition, all the companies were nationalized and no matter how well or badly they did - their employees earned the same. If you persuaded people to buy your washing powder instead of the other available washing powder - that just means the queues for your washing powder will be longer.
There was A LOT of communist and anti western propaganda tho. But no advertising is perfectly possible.
I live in Ukraine, and we still suffer from soviet limitations on advertisement and entrepreneurs. Every time when govt and parliament need to make some urgent reform, nobody could predict, what will really happen - as they could just raise taxes, or deform some industry with some unreal regulations, and only in few cases implement some adequate, for example synchronize with EU regulations.
For example, for banks appear problem, people avoid to pay credits, so need some enforcement - powers approved confiscation of property to pay credit, but with exceptions of unprotected people, so bank cannot confiscate from pensioners, when child registered in property, and few others, so literally huge percent of citizens now protected from banks, and this new law is step back, not progress.
Eh, even if you exclude any potential side effects like that I don't see it being workable. I believe advertising as done today is _mostly_ a zero sum game, but without any advertising at all, it's going to be _really_ hard to find out about stuff!
> that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
What? How? Advertising isn't a good or service. About the only way I could see it economically being damaging is if you subscribe to the "broken windows" theory of economics.
> Advertising tells me what goods and services are available, and at what prices.
No, it doesn't actually, it does the opposite. It's attempting to make you less aware of what's available outside of the monopolies, because the monopolies shove the barrel and there's no room left.
If you take a walk through town versus watch TV for a day you will get a completely different view of what products and services are out there. This mentality is exactly why small business continue to struggle - we're made to believe they don't exist because of advertising.
The reason this works is because the human brain is pretty stupid and it can't keep everything in it all at once. You also don't get a choice in what you remember, your brain does that without your consent. So you see McDonald's 1000 times and your local butcher shop signage 5 times and you'll remember one, but not the other.
I don't think anyone is against receiving marketing information they request, like a catalog. It is far different than advertising that people are essentially forced to view even if they don't want to see it. You request a catalog, just like you might request to view an online store's website. But advertising you don't request is a completely different ballgame. Imagine if every time you turned on or sat down at your computer it forced an open specific newspaper's site, or reddit, or twitter, and there was no way to stop it from happening. If every time you drove down a specific road all your electronic devices opened up some random website you didn't request or want. That is what people have a problem with.
Further, any store will be pretty highly incentivized to provide a quick list of goods or services offered and likely the prices (most already do this).
I don't need the same ad repeated 20 times to know that Ford sells cars and trucks.
> I don't need the same ad repeated 20 times to know that Ford sells cars and trucks.
Not only that, but the Ford ad of a vehicle driving cinematically across a landscape before disgorging a laughing and implausibly photogenic family does nothing to inform you about the relative merits of the vehicle. Anything specific mentioned in the advert is as likely to be flimflam or only technical truth as not, so nothing mentioned in the advert can be taken as useful purchase-informing fact without further research.
Exactly. There's an economic negative to advertising, particularly in the US, because "puffery" is legal. That gives advertisers nearly complete free reign to lie about stuff (especially if they put in a small white text disclaimer that says the things you are seeing and hearing aren't really true.)
Not really, or at least i don't see how. Advertising can at most tell me which companies are spending a significant portion of their budget in ads instead of in making a good product or service.
To put it another way: where i live, ads for cheese or meat are non existent (while ads for fast food or cigarettes are very common), and yet i know that those products are available on supermarkets or other food stores. And i can find cheeses and meats of many brands, qualities and prices on those stores.
I don't see how having ads for those things would be an improvement. In fact, i suspect that ads would be used to convince people to buy products of less quality, or downright toxic, as seen on the rampant fast food and cigarette ads.
Would you be interested in making a comment that adds to the conversation, instead of whatever this was? The person you're replying to identified constraints that prevent him from imagining it - any system for restricting advertisements will either be permissive enough that it's ineffective, or strict enough that it will be abused for political reasons. This sounds like a reasonable concern.
Can you imagine a realistic way around this issue?
The problem is the harder you try to imagine it, the less it looks like a better world.
Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy. Getting rid of a billboard for something I am never going to buy sounds great, but it kinda sucks for the person who actually is interested in the thing that billboard is advertising. Even if there were some type of advertising that provided no benefit to any part of society, the restriction on the freedom to communicate those advertisements is something that harms all of us.
Sometimes the part of building a better world that takes the most effort is recognizing where we already have.
> Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy
I would argue that paid advertisement is a force distorting free speech. In a town square, if you can pay to have the loudest megaphone to speak over everyone else, soon everyone would either just shut up and leave or not be able to speak properly, leaving your voice the only voice in the conversation. Why should money be able to buy you that power?
I mean most town squares have no restriction on using a megaphone, and yet town squares have not been drowned out and rendered useless by megaphones. Even if that did happen, it would be a very poor analogue to generic advertising which can not drown out conversation. At best it would be an argument against megaphones over a certain volume, ie certain methods of communication might be reasonable to restrict, but restricting the ideas that can be expressed by megaphone is indefensible.
> If somebody believes that their message is important enough to outbid everybody else, their message ought to be the one that is displayed.
Sometimes (often?) people with a lot of money may not believe in speech but in suppressing speech. However, money should not allow for suppressing speech, for example by buying a giant megaphone and speaking over people.
By your logic paying people $500 to heckle at your political opponents rally is fine. It may be legally okay, but it is a moral hazard, and for a better society we should try to better distinguish between “free” speech and “bought and paid for” speech.
If they believe their message is important they should do grassroots, talk to people and convince people to talk to other people. Trust me, if the message is good people volunteer their time.
The reality is that more often than not these messages are self serving and profit driven, many times borderline fraudulous in claims or questionable at best
> The reality is that more often than not these messages are self serving and profit driven
the reality is that all messages, even those you think ought to be a grassroots message, are all self-serving. It's just self-serving for you as well as the message deliverer. And those "advertising" messages are self-serving, but not for you (or your tribe).
Therefore, this is just a thinly disguised way to try suppress the messages of those whose self-interest does not align with your own, rather than an altruistic reason.
> it kinda sucks for the person who actually is interested in the thing that billboard is advertising
and it also sucks for the billboard's location owner, who is drawing a revenue from it.
People who proclaim that doing XYZ to make the world better, is not really considering the entirety of the world - just their corner. To claim that it would make the world better, they must show evidence that it doesn't hurt somebody else (who just happens to be in a different tribe to the proposer).
But it’s kind of great for the upshot who can’t afford the spot of the billboard like the incumbent can.
And it’s kind of great for the (dozens, hundreds, thousand, millions) of people to pass by the location who don’t have some eye soar blocking their view.
Your argument is basically that there are some people who benefit from advertising—I promise you anyone antagonistic toward advertising has considered this fact.
> anyone antagonistic toward advertising has considered this fact.
and yet, the apparent disregard for the interests of those currently benefiting from advertising is dismissed as mere trifles, not worthy of compensation.
Policy suggestions should not be so one sided. I would always use the veil of ignorance, and ensure that any policy suggestion go through this retorical device.
Agree with this entirely. In fact, I would go as far as saying if advertising was illegal, then expressing opinions would be illegal. Everything is an advertisement.
I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.
And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.