I'd love to see an efficient market too, but banning advertising won't accomplish that, it'll just shift the burden of discovery elsewhere, like review aggregat

I'd love to see an efficient market too, but banning advertising won't accomplish that, it'll just shift the burden of discovery elsewhere, like review aggregators, and information there is already questionably reliable. In practice, I think the problem that creates advertising is that humans have limited bandwidth for ingesting information in general, so we have tons of tools to compile more information into less information, such as news, books, statistics, reviews, etc. (For example, how many people really entirely understand their health insurance plans? It's not for lack of trying.) Advertising is sort of an arbitrage of that communication bandwidth based on the fact that some actors (companies) really want you to see their information more badly than others. That problem doesn't go away just because you ban advertising, it just moves the arbitrage opportunity elsewhere.