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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#981

Post by matthewsinclair »

gsf_emergency wrote: post #947
matthewsinclair wrote: post #632

Rather than ban ads in an absolutist sense, why not think about ads as “bads” (rather than “goods” in economic terms) and then tax them? Let’s define a “good” as something with positive utility and value, and define a “bad” as something that imposes harm or negative externalities. If we treat advertising as a “bad” — not uniformly, but in terms of impact (manipulation, misinformation, psychological harm) — then we ca…

some related ideas from the intellectual kernel of Google, for you to improve on/steal from https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan.... (I tend to think of the aether in which ads are transmitted as the public, uh, space)

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I will check that out.

In between you doing that and me thinking on it overnight, I ended up writing up my thoughts as a blog post [0], which I have submitted here to HN as well [1].

[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43620407

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#982

Post by dematz »

"Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment."

Feels similar to a point in a larger rant about bloated page sizes:

https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

"I think we need to ban third-party tracking, and third party ad targeting.

Ads would become dumb again, and be served from the website they appear on.

Accepted practice today is for ad space to be auctioned at page load time. The actual ads (along with all their javascript surveillance infrastructure) are pulled in by the browser after the content elements are in place.

In terms of user experience, this is like a salesman arriving at a party after it has already started, demanding that the music be turned off, and setting up their little Tupperware table stand to harass your guests. It ruins the vibe."

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#983

Post by moolcool »

miki123211 wrote: post #922

Advertising is a tax on the rich. It subsidizes basically all modern entertainment, from the filmmaking and sports industries (through TV Shows and sports broadcasts, respectively), to musicians and amateur filmmakers (through Spotify and Youtube). The costs of advertising are ultimately passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices for products and services, not unlike a VAT or sales tax. Because rich people…

> Advertising is a tax on the rich.

Even if advertisers make more money from the rich (citation needed), the poor are still disproportionately negatively effected. I would argue that it's less ethical to persuade someone with $100 to their name to spend $10 on something they don't need, than to persuade someone with $1,000,000 to spend $500 on something they don't need.

To bolster this argument, look at the things that are most advertised to the poor: alcohol, gambling, fast food, and predatory loans (including predatory auto financing). The wealthy, meanwhile, are more likely to be targeted with ads for lifestyle goods: health foods, travel, gym memberships.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#984

Post by betageek »

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…

I too spent far too many years in the adtech industry before realising that what I thought I was doing (helping fund cool things on the web) was not what I was actually doing (destroying the web as I knew it.) Having left it behind in the early 10s it's got way worse than I ever imagined, there's effectively no regulation at all now, and certainly no way of knowing where the ads stop and the content begins. Having sat in ad industry self regulation meetings myself I know the author is completely right, they will never do anything about any of the many many problems, so what else is there to do than ban it, nothing else is going to work with the system that currently exists.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#985

Post by QuantumGood »

jkhdigital wrote: post #437
QuantumGood wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Propaganda does not need advertising to disseminate itself, particularly not in 2025. There are multiple channels. Limiting one—advertising—just moves the flow to other channels.

Yes. Not all business models utilize public advertising. For example, MLMs like Amway and LuLaRoe. Advertising didn’t exist for most of history because mass media didn’t exist. Advertising is part and parcel of mass media.

Marketing existed, it was just a higher ratio of publicity, merchandising and astroturfing than today.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#987

Post by int_19h »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #646
dostick wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. If you think deeper, to first principles, it’s clear that disease is capitalism. I am not advocating socialism/communism, but isn’t it strange that capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics? In 100 years, about 100 countries tried it, and not one c…

> capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics? If taking a human-science view, then one interesting take on capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom. There can be no "science" of capitalism. It allows the direction of excess human psychological energy. It is the absence of regulation of anti-soci…

> capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom.

This is very wrong. Capitalism fundamentally requires abstract property rights (i.e. someone can own a thing they have never even held or seen, much less used), and it requires a state to provide very strong protections for those abstract rights.

In the absence of the state imposing such a property right regimen, you wouldn't have capitalism, since it'd be impossible to accumulate capital if the only way to own property is to physically use and/or occupy it.

Importantly, capitalism is not the same as free markets! Humanity has had free markets in one form or another for most of its history, but capitalism is very recent historically speaking.

The notion that socialism is always anti-individualistic is also wrong. Left-wing libertarianism is a thing, and goes back to the earliest anarchist writers (who literally invented the term "libertarian" as a political label - and they didn't have the likes of Ayn Rand in mind when they did that). There's even free-market left-wing anarchism.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#988

Post by gsf_emergency »

matthewsinclair wrote: post #981
gsf_emergency wrote: post #947

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some related ideas from the intellectual kernel of Google, for you to improve on/steal from https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan.... (I tend to think of the aether in which ads are transmitted as the public, uh, space)

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I will check that out. In between you doing that and me thinking on it overnight, I ended up writing up my thoughts as a blog post [0], which I have submitted here to HN as well [1]. [0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43620407

https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/29598

[0] Slightly tangentially, to be ignored, until later (after careful reconsideration of doubts raised in your [1]: https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/29610[2])

In particular, to consider how unification of the 2 notions of excludability/rivalry can lead to the 2 actions of subsidies/taxation coalescing (thus going "beyond good & evil")

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43621295

[4] https://www.econlib.org/the-correlation-between-excludabilit...

>Yet in the real world, both excludability and rivalry lie on a continuum.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#989

Post by cluckindan »

ManlyBread wrote: post #726
cluckindan wrote: post #724

If we make ads illegal, only criminals will advertise.

It would be hilarious to have a criminal trying to goad me into buying a bucket of fried chicken.

No. There would be some guy on the street goading you to enter a restaurant by offering you free chicken, and once you did enter, they would start pressuring you into ordering other things while overpaying for that bucket of low quality chicken that may or may not be a health hazard. There would be a threat of violence and you would not be allowed to leave before paying.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#990

Post by fennecfoxy »

For me it's the pointlessness of it all, and the fact that advertisements even when "targeted" are just sprayed out of a firehose at me.

So many apps I use are supported by 30-60s ads for some stupid fucking mobile game that I immediately know I don't want to install, I have no intention to interact with the ad and yet I'm forced to sit through it for 30s, only to hit the X on it and have it open the Play Store anyway?!?!

And video ads in general, if I know that I'm not interested right away, why am I forced to sit through 30-60s of it?

I mean I can look away from a fucking billboard...but this stuff. A great first step would be to make ads that forcibly hold attention like that illegal.

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