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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#891

Post by vjk800 »

dash2 wrote: post #682

This idea isn't uncommon because it's beyond the Overton window, it's uncommon because it is silly and unworkable. * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally. In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it! * Absolutely zero thought…

> * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.

Some limits exist on advertising exist in most countries. Do they respect free speech?

> * Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?

Absolutely zero thought is never given on policing boundaries on anything. That's not how the legal system operates. All laws are approximations at best and grey areas get decided by courts on a case-by-case basis.

> * Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.

In my country, advertising alcohol is forbidden. Somehow I still manage to find interesting new beers to try year after year

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#892

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"What if we banned all advertising?"

This sounds like someone who was born intoo an era of internet advertising. As opposed to someone who has been expoosed to adevrtising over many forms of media, the internet being only a recent addition.

The early internet had no advertising. Commercial use of the computer network against the rules.

The web-based companies comprising "Big Tech", while they dominate today's internet by acting as allegedly "necessary" intermediaries and conducting surveillance, appear to have no viable business model to stay "big" in this scenario: where the computer network does not allow advertising, let alone commercial use.

Thus, the question "What if we banned all advertising" sounds extreme, unrealistic, the product of myopia, all-or-nothing thinking. Advertising will always be "legal". But historically man has regulated where it can be disseminated/placed.

A more interesting question might be "What if we had a computer network where advertising was prohibited or limited". About 35 years ago we did. Then the rules against commercial use were removed. Now people are complaining. People who never used the network in the time before advertising was allowed.

Imagine what it would be like to have a computer network without advertising using the computer and networking technology we have today.

Maybe this network could be built on top of the internet, as an overlay.

Make no mistake, there will always be computer internetworks that allow advertising. But the first ones didn't. And there could be ones in the future that don't.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#893

Post by plankers »

junga wrote: post #347
stego-tech wrote: post #234

Just from the headline alone: oh please dear god yes . The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages. While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we canno…

> Advertising is cancer, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. That's the most "hacker" newsy thing to me. Whenever advertising critical articles come up, there's a large percentage of people commenting pro advertising. Yeah, I get it, you don't bite the hand that feeds you but come on. Does working in ad tech somehow influence your brains like the ones you are targeting?

Trotting this out again because somehow it hasn't completely saturated the internet yet:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

--Upton Sinclair

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#894

Post by Sloowms »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #358
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

> 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? 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 cas…

It's impossible, that's why you still see all those cigarette advertisements everywhere.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#895

Post by Cpoll »

dash2 wrote: post #682

This idea isn't uncommon because it's beyond the Overton window, it's uncommon because it is silly and unworkable. * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally. In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it! * Absolutely zero thought…

Tobacco advertisement is banned or heavily regulated in most of the world (including the U.S.).

Free speech has a couple dozen exceptions like libel, incitement to violence, etc. And besides, it's not clear how it applies to corporations.

"Free" gifts for influencers typically need to be disclosed. Otherwise it's just payola.

Arguments like "policing the boundaries" can be applied to a lot of existing laws, so it's not particularly useful.

> In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.

What information are you getting from a clip of a polar bear drinking a coke?

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#896

Post by kerkeslager »

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…

> This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech?

That's a great question, but let's not lose sight of the fact that failing to legislate on this is 0% reliable. If we even are able to identify and ban 25% of advertising, that level of reliability is a massive improvement over doing nothing. Don't fall for the perfect solution fallacy.

The reality is that some really basic, careful definitions of advertising would identify a huge percentage of advertising, without catching any cases that aren't advertising.

As a starting point, if a corporation pays a person or corporation to display their corporation's name, product, or logo on a physical property, broadcast, or publication when they aren't directly selling your product, that's advertising. Maybe you can think of some cases where that catches some stuff it shouldn't, and I'm open to revising it.

> What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?

> What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?

I think this sort of handwringing is pretty silly. I don't care about either of those--I do care about "free samples" in the sense of auto-renewing free trials, but that's because the intent is to trick people into forgetting to cancel, not because it's advertising.

Draw the line very conservatively, making a very clear definition of advertising that we can agree on illegal, and go from there as we see the effects (i.e. what loopholes people start to use). Regulation is an iterative process--start small and build.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#897

Post by xandrius »

or_am_i wrote: post #622

What if we built a strong culture around actively avoiding advertising? What if we educated the general public about adverse effects of time after time giving up your attention, without getting anything in return besides a short lived dophamine kick? What if we showed how it's only in those moments of paying attention a person has a chance to exercise agency over their own life, and spending that scarce resource on d…

Change advertising to anything we ban agree to ban as a society and you will see why putting the responsibility to the individual is not sufficient.

Laws don't get tired or can be forced through dark patterns. Laws are generally there to allow us to expect something from everyone at the same time.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#898

Post by xandrius »

RandomLensman wrote: post #824

How would that work for physical shops, restaurants etc.? No illuminated signs allowed? No products or services visibly displayed? Everything has to be invisible in the streets?

Good questions go get started, we can begin with the obvious and figure out the details later.

But yes, to me illuminated signs are wasteful to my attention and to environment, so out they would go.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#899

Post by marssaxman »

pembrook wrote: post #720
camgunz wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this dynamic in tech all the time: "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 o…

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…

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.

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