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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#121

Post by bofadeez »

gibbitz wrote: post #72
bofadeez wrote: post #15

This is free speech. It's not open for discussion. Our right to free speech is not granted by anyone's consent or by government decree. It preexists the state and cannot be taken away. We hold this truth to be self-evident. We are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. If any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

Someone else made the point that ads cost money, so this isn't about free speech. I guess making advertising free would be the same as banning it since it exists to be sold.

Any voluntary transaction between two conscious, consenting adults is axiomatically ethical and moral.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#122

Post by uniq7 »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #29
toomim wrote: post #10

This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech? The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed? What about giving out free sample…

Many lines are hard to draw but we benefit from trying to draw them. Worrying too much would be bikeshedding The biggest example that comes to mind is gambling. Japan says it's not gambling if the pachinko place gives you balls and then you have to walk next door to a "different" company to cash out the balls. I say it sounds like their laws are captured by the pachinko industry. Video game loot boxes are technically…

Any laws with blurred lines will be used by the people in power against their political adversaries to keep them in power.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#123

Post by fragmede »

toomim wrote: post #10

This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech? The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed? What about giving out free sample…

That's why it's such a stupid idea. People who want a world without advertising should create a product that will genuinely improve people's lives and be forced to work as a salesman selling that product and experience the practicalities of doing so before drawing lines. I'm not for unsolicited phone calls about my car's warranty during dinner, but advertising is not this universal evil that some make it out to be.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#125

Post by bigstrat2003 »

vaindil wrote: post #32
bofadeez wrote: post #15

This is free speech. It's not open for discussion. Our right to free speech is not granted by anyone's consent or by government decree. It preexists the state and cannot be taken away. We hold this truth to be self-evident. We are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. If any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

I feel that this is a very black and white view of the issue. I don't want to see billboards as I drive down the freeway, but I have no choice (in the US) if I need to get somewhere far away. Several states have banned outdoor billboards, should those governments be dissolved? At some point the public interest overrides an absolute freedom of speech. We can debate where that line is, but "it's not open for discussion…

> We can debate where that line is, but "it's not open for discussion" is objectively incorrect.

This is inherently a subjective matter. It's not possible to be objectively incorrect on whether or not speech protection should be absolute.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#126

Post by throwanem »

ambicapter wrote: post #97
arrosenberg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not speech that needs to be regulated, it’s broadcast (which should not have 1A protections at nearly the same level). Even if a waiter is giving recommendations, those are limited to the people at the table and there is clearly a mutual exchange of value. Broadcast (aka Industrial) advertising is something we accept, but not because it particularly benefits the viewer. It benefits the broadcaster and advertiser…

I think this is the best insight on this thread. Laws of this kind would be like banning billboards in cities, which has been done.

And we already regulate actual broadcast on this basis.

For example, it violates no rule to include valid Emergency Broadcast System/Emergency Alert System tones (the electronic, machine-interpretable "chirps") in a movie or TV show, or to publish that via streaming, DVD etc. But no one does this, because broadcasting spurious tones (and triggering spurious automated broadcast interruptions) carries serious first-instance fines to which FCC licensees (ie distributors via broadcast) agree as a condition of licensure. They know they aren't allowed to do this and, very occasional and expensive mishaps excepted, they won't take the risk. (1) So program material that wants to include those tones has to make sure they're excluded from the TV edit, or decide whether the verisimilitude is worth the limit on audience access.

While the specifics of course vary among cases, the basic theory of broadcast (ie distribution) as distinct from and less protected than speech, with the consequential distinction drawn specifically along the scale at which speech is distributed, seems clear.

(1) Some may note instances such as one of the Purge films (iirc) that seem to contradict this claim. Compare the tones in those examples with the ones in test samples or generated by a compliant encoder [1] for the "Specific Area Message Encoding" protocol. Even without a decoder, the FSK frequencies and timings have to be resilient to low-bandwidth channels designed to carry human voice, so it's all well within audible ranges and you can hear the difference between real tones and what a movie or show can safely use. Typically either the pitch is dropped below compliant ranges, or the encoding is intentionally corrupted, or both. But almost always, the problem is just sidestepped entirely, since it's the attention tone that everyone really notices anyway.

[1] https://cryptodude3.github.io/same/ is no more certified than mine but has, unlike my own implementation, been tested against a real EAS ENDEC. At some point I want to test mine against that one and find out how badly I screwed up reading the spec ten years ago...

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#127

Post by imiric »

toomim wrote: post #10

This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech? The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed? What about giving out free sample…

We don't need to go into absurd discussions in order to prevent 99% of the harm that comes from modern advertising.

The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.

Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising.

Giving out "free" samples? Presumably someone is being paid to do that, so advertising.

We can later quibble about edge cases and how to handle someone putting up a sign for their business. Many countries have regulations about visual noise, so that should be considered as well.

But it's pretty easy to distinguish advertising that seeks to manipulate, and putting a stop to that. Hell, we could start by surfacing the dark data broker market and banning it altogether. That alone should remove the most egregious cases of privacy abuse.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#128

Post by _def »

tener wrote: post #113
kelseyfrog wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ambiguity of these questions is a feature rather than a bug. Being unable to tell when something is "advertising" forces everyone to think twice before hawking their wares, which is exactly what we want if we intend to kill ads. The chilling effect is precisely the intention. It’s the engineer’s curse to believe that airtight laws are automatically better, or that justice springs from mechanistic certainty. The w…

So we end up in a system in which those with money to litigate will do what they want? I'd rather have airtight laws instead.

That's where we are right now. Airtight laws are impossible in complex systems.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#130

Post by neom »

Humans, incentives, and capitalism are fundamentally intertwined. Capitalism at its core is simply a game we play daily together, driven by incentives. Banning advertising doesn’t remove incentives, just rearranges them.... If you change one rule (like banning advertising), the system has is always very quickly reorganize around the new incentives. Also, given we live in a fully 100% market driven society, trust, not attention, is the true currency. As long as humans exchange value, influence is inevitable. To effectively improve the system, you can't just ban advertising because the idea should not be to try to stop persuasion, it's a requirement in a functioning free market driven society as it enables many many many downstream effects.
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