The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

>Ads are speech.

No, they are not.

People have been brainwashed and legal systems have been paid and bought for to consider them as such, just like corporations have been whitewashed to be treated as "persons".

In any case, we regulate all other kinds of speech as well: explicit content, libel, classified information, cigarette ads, and so on.

Case law, also known as common law, is a British legal tradition. Most of the EU does not follow the common law tradition. There may be supreme courts, but the notion of binding precedent, or stare decisis as in the US legal system does not exist. Appeal and Supreme court decisions may be referenced in future cases, but don't establish precedent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent>

The equivalent doctrine under a civil legal system (most of mainland Europe) is jurisprudence constante, in which "if a court has adjudicated a consistent line of cases that arrive at the same holdings using sound reasoning, then the previous decisions are highly persuasive but not controlling on issues of law" (from above Wikipedia link). See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisprudence_constante>

Interestingly, neither the principle of Judicial Review (in which laws may be voided by US courts) or stare decisis are grounded in either the US Constitution or specific legislation. The first emerged from Marbury v. Madison (1803), heard by the US Supreme Court (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison>), and the second is simply grounded in legal tradition, though dating to the British legal system. Both could be voided, possibly through legislation, definitely by Constitutional amendment. Or through further legal decisions by the courts themselves.

Advertising is a monetary transaction between an advertiser and a publisher. The customer (or product) is not involved in the transaction; it is their attention that is being bought and sold.

That's a different model than paying a technical writer to do technical writing.

> Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective.

For the most part they're trash. There is a narrow range of effectiveness where the cost of compliance is low and thereby can be exceeded by the expected cost of reasonable penalties imposed at something significantly less than 100% effective enforcement, e.g. essentially all gas stations stopped selling leaded gasoline because unleaded gasoline isn't that much more expensive.

The cost of complying with a ban on advertising is high, so the amount of effort that will be put into bypassing it will be high, which is the situation where that doesn't work.

> As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations.

It essentially bifurcated content creation and distribution into "this is 100% porn" and "this company will not produce or carry anything that would cause it to have to comply with those rules" which inhibits quality for anything that has to go in the "porn" box and pressures anything in the "not porn" box to be sufficiently nerfed that they don't have to hire more lawyers.

The combination of "most human communication now happens via social media" and "expressing your own sexuality is effectively banned on most major social media platforms" is probably a significant contributor to the fact that people are having less sex now and the fertility rate is continuing to decline. "All the boobs you could ever possibly look at but only on the sites where there is no one you will ever marry" is not a super great way to split up the internet.

The ambiguity in the definition frequently causes people to be harassed or subject to legal risk when doing sex education, anatomy, etc. when they're trying to operate openly with a physical presence in a relevant jurisdiction. Conversely, it's the internet and it's global so every terrible thing you'd want to protect anyone from is all still out there and most of the rules are imposing useless costs for no benefits, or worse, causing things to end up in places where there are no rules, not even the ones that have nothing to do with sex.

It's now being used as an guise to extract ID from everyone for surveillance purposes.

It's a solid example of bad regulations setting fire to the omnishambles.

I’m mixed on this. I do at times waste a lot of time doom scrolling, and would like regulation to prevent me from doing so. But also some times you just want to doomscroll to escape your day to day life. Do we want this decision to be made by the govt?

I guess we don’t let people have hard drugs even if sometimes they just need to escape their painful life. And maybe this could fall under that logic. But we do let people drink themselves, which serves the same purpose. And if I had to choose, I think doomscrolling is more at the level of Drinking, and less at the level of Heroin. So I would actually be fine with an age limit for doomscrolling after which, you have a hands off approach.