24 ms·

We need legal controls on web advertising

181 points by samizdis 6y ago

notRobot 6y ago
I wonder, how would the world be different if a major government was to completely ban user tracking? Ad companies would be forced to use contextual advertising. How would that play out?
- jakubp 6y ago
  I had a different idea, which was that governments of the future could ban advertising altogether. I know it's a... stretch, but imagine this: - you can't put billboards in the city - you can't place any images, text, etc. banners anywhere (except for tightly controlled, single-design descriptions of businesses in buildings, decided by each municipality like it's already done in some cities to maintain consistent look of historical town centers) - in general, no publicly visible ads of any kind are allowed - no ads in videos, TV, etc. Where would ads be? - you can search for ads like you do today, in search engines (preferably opt in), i.e. ads become a catalogue, not a "here I am" attention grabber - gray line (recommendations/suggestions which really are ads would need to be limited/removed as well) to be decided In general, clear up public space and attention holding spaces from explicit commercial interests as much as possible. I'd love to live a few years in such a world and see whether value propositions of businesses would start shifting...
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    I grew up in a place like this. It was very nice, honestly. It was possible to attain inner peace and quiet while being out in the street and not be disturbed by something one would consider intentionally intrusive for minutes or even hours at a time.
  - samizdis 6y ago
    As a slight tangent, there have been restrictions on advertising that might affect views from the River Thames in London that date back more than 100 years. In an effort to circumvent these restrictions, a company name was incorporated into brickwork features of what's known as the "Oxo Tower" - Oxo being a brand of stock cubes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxo_Tower#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxo_Tower#History
  - notRobot 6y ago
    There have been cities that have banned all forms of outdoor advertising (such as billboards)! Here's some links you might like: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/adblocking-the-global-cities-clearing-streets-of-advertising-to-promote-human-and-environmental-health/ https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/adblocking-the-globa... https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-kick-ads-ban-urban-billboards https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-ki... A gallary of Tokyo stripped of advertising: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2015/aug/12/tokyo-without-ads-japan-stripped-bare-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2015/aug/12/tokyo...
    - jakubp 6y ago
      Wow, I never knew, thank you. These pictures look lovely, now in space like this one might actually focus :)
  - tomjen3 6y ago
    You would end up stalling the development of new products. I can't invent and sell an 800 usd massage chair if people assume they cost 5000 usd and so don't even go looking for them. I can't start a "we are cheaper than wallmart" discount business without advertising this fact. You need advertisements, or something like that, to encourage new products and price competition. You do not need tracking for any reason since you can advertise against the content of the article, video or podcast. If I am reading up about apartment prices in AREA, serve me suggestions based on that. Targted ads don't work.
    - im3w1l 6y ago
      That's a nice theory but doesn't mirror my experience. Online ads will be for overpriced junk, when it's not literal scams. The reason is it's all highest bidder, no quality control. If there was an ad network with a brand, with a reputation for only running ads for high quality products at competitive prices, then maybe I'd pay attention. EDIT: Writing this comment made me consciously pay attention to ads to verify my thesis, but honestly the quality was better than I expected.
    - jakubp 6y ago
      Yes, it would stall development of a lot of business. Many of these businesses are not necessary. Humans would start a different path of looking for what's actually useful rather than falling for what's out there -- or at least that's the dream :) [edit] Onto your second point, that you need ads to promote price competition, I don't think so. There's almost no advertisement in many kinds of services like e.g. hair salons, but they still very much compete (price included). Also, huge majority of professional trainers do not advertise anywhere in my area, and yet we all compete on price and our customers know the range of prices that are reasonable. So information about price etc. flows quite well regardless of ads.
      - bgilroy26 6y ago
        There is an honest need in here, to surface unknown unknowns within the world's of consumer producta/services. It could be solved by a trade show/business fair kind of thing (maybe we would know we had solved it when B2C looked like B2B) The thing is, advertising does not efficiently suggest products/services now, so the idea that removing it would hurt customers ability to find what they want is a little melodramatic
  - tjpnz 6y ago
    If enough people abandon cities I could see this happening. Imagine how much it would cost to engage a marketing company to put your BS "message" onto a billboard and have enough people see it. Imagine too all of the added compliance costs that would come with having to deal with dozens of small municipalities, each with their own quirky laws.
    - oblio 6y ago
      That sounds like a nightmare. Cities are not perfect but they're amazing for a million reasons. Civilization started with agriculture and then with cities. There are big cities, see the comments above yours, where billboards are banned or strictly limited. There's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
  - IvanK_net 6y ago
    I wish you could think a bit before writing such thing. How do you decide what is an ad and what is not an ad? What if I tell my friend, that my new TV is really good? What if I tell it to 10 of my friends? What if I send an email to everyone I know, saying, that my new TV is great? Would you investigate, if the TV manufacturer paid me or not? How exactly would you do it? Or did they gave me a discount on the TV? I wish you could see, that you can not ban advertising, without banning free speech. It would be also great to ban lying in media, right?
    - zentiggr 6y ago
      Well, you're not a billboard, or any other fixed sign broadcasting to everyone that walks by, or pushing your opinion at literally everyone you meet, so while you may have an opinion, it's not being forced on everyone who comes in proximity to you. As opposed to the billboards, building side adverts, and web site ads that are just splatting out at anyone that happens by.
  - Super_Jambo 6y ago
    My idea for this is that we should nationalise advertising & product discovery. Over consumption is killing the planet, processed foods are destroying our health, user engagement hacking is eroding free will. Powerful companies like HSBC manipulate the press through the pressure of their ad-spend. [1] But obviously we can't just see the vast advertising industry and all it supports vanish overnight. However, we could nationalize them. We could pay last years ad-spend to market healthy food, low consumption & social connections. Then next year we could cut spending a little, say 90%. If companies can't survive without the economic dead weight of advertising then they shouldn't exist. It's not like they're required for product discovery in the information technology age. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-telegraph-hsbc-coverage-fraud-readers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-t...
  - wincy 6y ago
    My city (Overland Park, Kansas) definitely has some sort of restrictions on billboards [0]. I looked it up, if you're super interested on page 230 it indicates that there's a density restriction (1200 feet from already existing billboards) and a zoning restriction against residential (400 feet). They also can't be on top of a building, or over 30 feet tall. I can't really think of any billboards nearby, so I think this effectively restricts the billboards to maybe very busy interstates and nowhere else. Going across state lines into Missouri is very noticeable because there's billboards everywhere. [0] http://online.encodeplus.com/regs/overlandpark-ks/export2doc.aspx?pdf=1&tocid=018 http://online.encodeplus.com/regs/overlandpark-ks/export2doc...
- bregma 6y ago
  I despair it will be the opposite. To enhance revenues in the face of recent unexpected expenses due to global pandemic, government will embrace advertising to enhance revenues. Not just government web sites, but all government communications and services. Finding the right line to fill in when completing your tax form will become a game of Where's Waldo among the print ads. Want to see the beauty of a national park... it's right there behind the electronic billboards taking advantage of the proximity detectors in your phone and linked to user tracking. There is too much lucre at stake for the government to be allowed to regulate. The government is vulnerable and needs to be supported by the advertising lobby. After all, it's what they do.
- ancymon 6y ago
  I think one of the reasons for user tracking is fraud detection. The moment you get rid off it, nobody would be willing to "risk" advertising on smaller, unknown websites. So maybe such ban would make monetization for small publishers much harder.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Fraud is only a problem for advertisements based on CPM/CPC. Time-based advertisements (pay X to have your ad displayed here for Y time) tracked by overall purchases (using an unique link) don't have a "fraud" problem given that the only way to boost the ad's effectiveness is to literally buy the product multiple times and pay for it.
raxxorrax 6y ago
Agreed and advertisers do agree too. They themselves demanded controversial content to be removed while their ads are showing, society demanding the same is in line with that thought. They do pay for many internet services, but I think the negative aspects outbalance the monetary advantages.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  > They themselves demanded controversial content to be removed I don't think this is necessarily true. They demanded that their ads are not shown next to controversial content. An unintended consequence of this is that the definition of 'controversial' is fluid and open to abuse. So if a pressure-group deems your thoughts and opinions 'controversial' you get no ads. And if you get no ads there's no real incentive for YT or whatever to serve your content; they're not charities. Your only other option is to self-host. So advertisers and indirectly control the societal narrative, and that should be troubling.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    Youtube can just set the conditions with their market share. Content creators draw the attention they sell to advertisers. They made the mistake that they did comply and now get overwhelmed with further demands. They could have just had a "take it or leave it" strategy and I am very sure advertisers would just have continued to pay, because it benefits them too. Youtube set the precedent for advertisers demanding editorial control on content, it is purely on their misbehavior we have this problem. Because now advertisers can be made responsible where their ads are shown and what is seen next to them.
taurath 6y ago
CCPA for me is, for all its faults and ambiguities, to me a great start in that you must provide controls, so eventually maybe the controls can have teeth behind them. The definition of “operational” data though is where it currently falls flat. The article speaks mostly of telemetry rather than ad delivery - however “native” ads delivered in content streams such as thru Reddit’s newer APIs are harder to filter. The only reason client side tracking was a thing in the first place was that the browser data was the easiest way to fingerprint users. We’re entering the age that happens after the market consolidation - the squeeze. Hoping the eventual alternative shows itself soon.
h1fra 6y ago
It always bother me that ads on tv/paper/radio are highly controlled, regulated (at least in France), with maximum time and restricted content. But ads in internet are just wild! You can have 1 minute of ads for less than 10 minutes of content, plus all the banners, sponsored content etc... I wish the Europe would regulate this and impose a maximum exposition time for ads, like we have for tv. (e.g: in France 6-9 minutes per hour in average)
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I believe (but don't quote me on this) that the existing laws SHOULD also apply to online ads, but for some restrictions maybe. It may take a lawsuit for e.g. youtube to start following these restrictions.
  - FriedrichN 6y ago
    IANAL but that's usually not the case for most European countries, these guidelines are mostly specific to radio and TV.
- ricardo81 6y ago
  It seems to me anecdotally as a free YouTube user that the number of ads I see on there have been cranked up. As often as once every 3 minutes. I remind myself that I'm not paying anything for their hosting and serving of the video, but it still grinds... particularly so when it's the likes of BBC content which as a UK license payer, has already been paid for and is being monetised on there.
  - ratww 6y ago
    I've seen a lot of individuals reporting the same thing. Also, it seems almost every video has ads now. I wonder if those videos you see in landing pages will get them too. Also, it started showing a "please sign up" to me every hour or so, which is not only disruptive but also buggy, as it forces me to reload the page, losing the position of the video.
    - 6y ago
BlueTemplar 6y ago
> why no home router makers have put ad and track filtering in their products is slightly mystifying French ISP "Free" used to vocally advertise their router ad blocker (consumer interest). They also vocally claimed to be the underdog and fought YouTube then Netflix (huge data volume interconnections are expensive). If I'm not mistaken, in all the 3 cases they ended up "settling"
- SCNP 6y ago
  While it would be awesome to have hardware that did the heavy lifting, I don't like the incentives for commercial products anywhere near the ad-space. It would only be a matter of time before a firmware update allows "permitted" ads through because the advertiser paid the proper sum. It may be time to finally set up my pi-hole.
  - mguerville 6y ago
    I set up NextDNS instead of a pi-hole, because frankly pi-hole seemed a bit daunting as a non technical user (if not setup, proper maintenance) and it's been great, between that and uBlock Origin I feel well shielded, and when I use my wife's iPad with neither of these I'm appalled at what the internet has become ad-wise
    - elliekelly 6y ago
      I was using PiHole and switched to NextDNS and it’s been fantastic. It’s way easier to maintain.
    - samoa42 6y ago
      just beware that pi-hole and nextdns are not the same thing, albeit they maybe solve the same problem on the user end. but nextdns is suffering from the same problem as every other centralised service (beeing a prime point for siphoning information on a large scale and a easy target for manipulation)
      - mguerville 6y ago
amadeuspagel 6y ago
> It's kind of a tech company too, but in a good-enough sort of way rather than the "hey, we invented the transistor" sort of way. Really? PageRank is not an invention like the transistor?
- baq 6y ago
  not sure if you're trolling but yeah, it isn't. algorithms are discovered. inventions require physical objects, so all software patents end up being 'method and apparatus'.
  - tantalor 6y ago
    Tell that to RSA.
pjc50 6y ago
The UK does have control on web advertising, but it's pretty limited: https://www.asa.org.uk/news/regulation-of-online-advertising.html https://www.asa.org.uk/news/regulation-of-online-advertising...
xkde 6y ago
Conversely, we could try not fiddling with it: https://youtu.be/6txA3pI0xJI https://youtu.be/6txA3pI0xJI And playing minesweeper.
- oblio 6y ago
  Why? Because it will self-regulate? Because people will vote with their wallets? That's how we got leaded gasoline for 60+ years.
  - xkde 6y ago
    Leaded gasoline and the Internet are hardly comparable. But go ahead and make straw man arguments.
    - oblio 6y ago
      Corporate malfeasance with corporate malfeasance. How are they not comparable? The incentives are not aligned: corporate profit vs the commons.
      - xkde 6y ago
        Dumping chemicals in shared rivers/air vs placing ads in a privately owned space that users have the option of visiting. Not comparable. The fact that more people use Gmail than Protonmail / others is a testament to their willingness to trade their eyeballs on ads for a service they don't have to spend their monetary resources on. It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance from the largest, unbreakable corporate entity (ie. the government)?
        Nextgrid 6y ago
        > users have the option of visiting Except that advertisers' activities goes beyond just showing ads. They stalk you, collect data and build a profile which will persist forever & be used down the line against you in one way or another (either intentionally by those advertisers or by someone else if the data falls into the wrong hands) long after you've left the website.
lordnacho 6y ago
If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It's as if there's a line between actively lying ("Studies show that men who buy this car will find many many women attracted to them") and just putting it there suggestively, for some as yet undescribed but working cognitive bias to do its magic. Some advertisers even make a joke out of it, eg the Lynx ads where the dude is thronged by a huge horde of women. It's a cliché, for a good reason. I suppose most people will just say you have free will and it's your own fault for thinking what was suggested, but I sense this is more of a grey zone than most people are willing to admit. How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion?
- jasode 6y ago
  >humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? [...] How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion? I'm (genuinely) surprised that someone with your financial background knowledge would write those sentences about "free market". I think you already know that the "free" in "free market" means free (as practically possible) from government controls. (The first sentence in wikipedia.[1]) E.g., the baker decides to bake 10 loaves of bread instead of a government official telling him a quota. Yes, I understand that many people use another definition of "free market" to mean "theoretical and impossible to exist market" -- because it would require all humans to be all-knowledgeable Laplace's Demon[2] and impervious to hidden influences. Ok, I get that language usage evolves and labels get diluted and therefore, "free market" is meaningless. In that case, what _do_ we call imperfect humans trading without government dictating quotas to us? I'm open to alternative labels. EDIT: people are misunderstanding my comment to lordnacho. I'm not against government intervention to limit bad effects of ads. I'm dissecting lordnacho's rhetoric. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon
  - 6y ago
marcus_holmes 6y ago
I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers. I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.
- ddevault 6y ago
  Strong agree. Advertising should be outlawed entirely. Or rather, corporate propaganda should be outlawed. Psychologically manipulating people for profit is horrible, I cannot comprehend how it's become normalized. This is our brains on capitalism, I guess.
  - ryanianian 6y ago
    If we outlaw it or have some litmus test for "propaganda-vs-ad" etc there will of course be very smart people who figure out the loopholes. Hence "influencers" and astroturfing and ads that masquerade as blogs and...even without legal restrictions in place.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      The law isn't a script. Exploiting loopholes can either result in a judge intepreting the law as designed and handing down a fine regardless, or we can work to refine the law in further legislation. Just because it's difficult and someone will try to circumvent it doesn't mean we shouldn't work on it.
  - jancsika 6y ago
    I guess you're getting downvoted because your statement is rather broad. But narrowing a bit to the feedback loop between data collected by the ad machine and the next ad you see based on that and ongoing data collection-- if Las Vegas casino games are regulated then we can certainly regulate that dangerous practice.
coldcode 6y ago
If there was a non gamefiable system for allowing people to pay a small amount automatically for reading content, and that system allowed you to specify you did not want to pay, which then told the website this and allowed it to show ads instead, otherwise they got most of the small amount, what would that do to advertising? Ads exist to (1) pay for free content (2) try to get you to buy/try/etc the thing being advertised. If (1) were taken care of, would (2) even exist? Or would websites just do both and piss everyone off?
varispeed 6y ago
If think ad targeting should be illegal, because if you know who is going to see your ad, you can easily manipulate them into signing up or buying the product by exploiting characteristics that person may have.
krono 6y ago
Internet ads as we see them today are absolutely disastrous for people with ADHD. When even people who don't have to deal with this disability are finding these ads way too distracting, it can't be hard to imagine just how bad it is for us invalids. Taking away my ability to use an ad blocker - like what Google is trying to do - would be like removing all wheelchair ramps. It would have a massive negative impact on my quality of life, and would have far reaching consequences for my productivity levels. Meta: Posted this earlier in response to a top level comment but figured it's better on its own.
Zeing0Ch 6y ago
I don't think that any government should ever make such fine-grained regulation. Telling the most innovative companies on the planet how they supposed to function is a recipe for disaster. There will never be another Google-like company if this becomes law that's for sure. Also of course people have control already, they can chose not to visit websites with ads on them.
superkuh 6y ago
Legal controls? You mean you want to bring in government regulation so that all the players down to the smallest personal website will have to do all the things required of even the most giant corporations? So that once this onerous system of centralized control is set up it'll soon be bought and co-opted by the very people it was meant to regulate originally? No. We've already seen this game play out over and over, and recently too! It's not like GDPR has stopped the big corporations from monetizing information about you. It's just made it so that WHOIS lookups are now worthless and don't even contain contact emails.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  Imagine a system that's so technologically complex, that lawmakers can't even create laws to codify the system, much less controls on the dependent systems. We already have that in the W3C browsers. This idea of "legal controls" on advertising will have to start with well understood systems before online advertising is affected, imo.
eimrine 6y ago
Europe has legal controls over cookies and it is nothing good: more banners having buttons doing something I do not know (so I ignore them despite using 10-20% of viewport for viewing the content). I think web does not need any legal control.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  The original "cookie law" was indeed badly designed, however the GDPR is sane. The only problem (which causes the banners & annoyances) is that it's not being enforced (the aforementioned annoyances are actually against the regulation).
x0hm 6y ago
In "The World Beyond Your Head" by Matthew B. Crawford, the author introduces the idea of an "attentional commons". The gist of this is that there are shared resources in the world. Air and water are examples. We recognize them as shared resources, and we recognize that without regulations, some people would use them in ways that make them unusable for others. Crawford makes a pitch for treating "attention" as a resource, and asserts that folks should have a right not to be addressed by mechanized means. It's a very good read, especially for software developers, phenomenologists, or cognitive science folks. Additionally, doesn't advertising go directly against the notion of a "free market"? The idea that "capitalism breeds competition, and competition creates quality" goes out the window when huge advertising budgets urge you to buy some cheap commodity product over a well-made product with a smaller advertising budget.
janci 6y ago
The only legislation on ads we need is right to block ads.
mrloba 6y ago
How about we fix the underlying problem: how to earn money without advertising? The issue right now is that subscribing to 100s of different services is both annoying and expensive. What if you could subscribe to a single service, which then would compensate the different services you use based on how much you use them? Sort of like how Spotify compensates artists based on number of listens. Quite easy to solve technically I think, but of course hard to solve socially.
- tehwebguy 6y ago
  Wait who is the org that will pay websites and services based on how much time I use them?
  - mrloba 6y ago
    Hopefully not a single org, or any org. But like I said, it's not easy to solve socially. The main point is to somehow get paid without advertising (Which already exists, it's just that people won't pay individually for every service on the internet. At least that's my assumption).
    - ev1 6y ago
      The hardest part is probably how you would handle payments. I'm happy to pay for things like newspaper site subscriptions - I just don't want to give my card or any identifying information to known spammers, 30-days-to-unsubscribe data-sellers, and hostile companies that refuse to allow you to cancel subscriptions other than calling them during a 1 hour timespan once a week. I'd be happy to throw $0.25 at a single article with no advertising or tracking and without leaking any identifying information at all - that means I have balance stored somehow, and I do not want to give even an email address [they've already shown that they cannot be trusted with it, much less anything else]. For example, NYT allows Californians purely because of the law that requires you to be able to sign up online -> cancel online only has this turned on if you have a CA billing address and CA geoip. This is hostile, asshole design. The code is there already, the implementation is there already, they just require everyone in every other state to call in during tight hours if not absolutely forced to via regulation. Blizzard/EA: Call of Duty has an option to opt out of selling your personal information. This option is only visible to be modified at all (not disabled - just gone entirely) if you are on a CA IP. If you ever log in once from another machine or another location, it's reset to retroactively sell all information and also not shown on the options menu. Excessively heavy handed legal controls are needed because nobody can fucking behave.
nathias 6y ago
The way we make our money makes all the difference for our cultures and general way of life, it seems that we have chosen poorly and we have little recourse. In a world of add-salesmen inoffensiveness becomes the chief value. This value scheme has become central to the modern left and right poles of politics, but instead of affirming or negating it, we should just regulate its conditions out of existence. If we don't achieve this (and we won't), what comes next is an even more aggressive affirmation of inoffensiveness, which will give to an open affirmation of censorship in the name of preventing "harm" and "exclusion" aided by technology. When censorship was historically affirmed, it was to remove the 'wrong' opinion, but what was right was very clearly presented, however, because now the primary value is negatively determined there is no way it can be totalized and presented as something known. This indetermination of negativity, coupled with a new power of technology that can exert control in a much more detailed way, accompanied by a general trend of digitalization of all human activity will make censorship ubiquitous and insidious.
DoubleGlazing 6y ago
What we have today isn't really advertising in my opinion. To me advertising should be fairly passive and loosely targetted. Basically putting car ads on a motoring website or serving local interest ads based on your location. What the web has given us is a form of "thought manipulation". It has gone beyond just trying to make us aware of a product in to manipulating us to make irrational decisions. The idea of the likes of Google and other ad brokers constantly researching web users actions in order to get inside their heads really bothers me. It's more than creepy, its disturbing.
Bakary 6y ago
One thing that has always bothered me about advertising is that to work in that sphere you have to be more soulless than usual, even if it can have good outcomes or make many services possible. You have to spend 40+ hours a week coming up with ways to exploit human psychological weakness. You can dress it up in many other ways but that's the core unavoidable aspect of it. Only a tiny minority of the work goes into ads that simply state of a product's existence, and these often serve to make physical spaces uglier to live in.

181 points by samizdis 6y ago

I wonder, how would the world be different if a major government was to completely ban user tracking? Ad companies would be forced to use contextual advertising. How would that play out?

jakubp 6y ago
I had a different idea, which was that governments of the future could ban advertising altogether. I know it's a... stretch, but imagine this: - you can't put billboards in the city - you can't place any images, text, etc. banners anywhere (except for tightly controlled, single-design descriptions of businesses in buildings, decided by each municipality like it's already done in some cities to maintain consistent look of historical town centers) - in general, no publicly visible ads of any kind are allowed - no ads in videos, TV, etc. Where would ads be? - you can search for ads like you do today, in search engines (preferably opt in), i.e. ads become a catalogue, not a "here I am" attention grabber - gray line (recommendations/suggestions which really are ads would need to be limited/removed as well) to be decided In general, clear up public space and attention holding spaces from explicit commercial interests as much as possible. I'd love to live a few years in such a world and see whether value propositions of businesses would start shifting...
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I grew up in a place like this. It was very nice, honestly. It was possible to attain inner peace and quiet while being out in the street and not be disturbed by something one would consider intentionally intrusive for minutes or even hours at a time.
- samizdis 6y ago
  As a slight tangent, there have been restrictions on advertising that might affect views from the River Thames in London that date back more than 100 years. In an effort to circumvent these restrictions, a company name was incorporated into brickwork features of what's known as the "Oxo Tower" - Oxo being a brand of stock cubes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxo_Tower#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxo_Tower#History
- notRobot 6y ago
  There have been cities that have banned all forms of outdoor advertising (such as billboards)! Here's some links you might like: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/adblocking-the-global-cities-clearing-streets-of-advertising-to-promote-human-and-environmental-health/ https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/adblocking-the-globa... https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-kick-ads-ban-urban-billboards https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-ki... A gallary of Tokyo stripped of advertising: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2015/aug/12/tokyo-without-ads-japan-stripped-bare-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2015/aug/12/tokyo...
  - jakubp 6y ago
    Wow, I never knew, thank you. These pictures look lovely, now in space like this one might actually focus :)
- tomjen3 6y ago
  You would end up stalling the development of new products. I can't invent and sell an 800 usd massage chair if people assume they cost 5000 usd and so don't even go looking for them. I can't start a "we are cheaper than wallmart" discount business without advertising this fact. You need advertisements, or something like that, to encourage new products and price competition. You do not need tracking for any reason since you can advertise against the content of the article, video or podcast. If I am reading up about apartment prices in AREA, serve me suggestions based on that. Targted ads don't work.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    That's a nice theory but doesn't mirror my experience. Online ads will be for overpriced junk, when it's not literal scams. The reason is it's all highest bidder, no quality control. If there was an ad network with a brand, with a reputation for only running ads for high quality products at competitive prices, then maybe I'd pay attention. EDIT: Writing this comment made me consciously pay attention to ads to verify my thesis, but honestly the quality was better than I expected.
  - jakubp 6y ago
    Yes, it would stall development of a lot of business. Many of these businesses are not necessary. Humans would start a different path of looking for what's actually useful rather than falling for what's out there -- or at least that's the dream :) [edit] Onto your second point, that you need ads to promote price competition, I don't think so. There's almost no advertisement in many kinds of services like e.g. hair salons, but they still very much compete (price included). Also, huge majority of professional trainers do not advertise anywhere in my area, and yet we all compete on price and our customers know the range of prices that are reasonable. So information about price etc. flows quite well regardless of ads.
    - bgilroy26 6y ago
      There is an honest need in here, to surface unknown unknowns within the world's of consumer producta/services. It could be solved by a trade show/business fair kind of thing (maybe we would know we had solved it when B2C looked like B2B) The thing is, advertising does not efficiently suggest products/services now, so the idea that removing it would hurt customers ability to find what they want is a little melodramatic
- tjpnz 6y ago
  If enough people abandon cities I could see this happening. Imagine how much it would cost to engage a marketing company to put your BS "message" onto a billboard and have enough people see it. Imagine too all of the added compliance costs that would come with having to deal with dozens of small municipalities, each with their own quirky laws.
  - oblio 6y ago
    That sounds like a nightmare. Cities are not perfect but they're amazing for a million reasons. Civilization started with agriculture and then with cities. There are big cities, see the comments above yours, where billboards are banned or strictly limited. There's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- IvanK_net 6y ago
  I wish you could think a bit before writing such thing. How do you decide what is an ad and what is not an ad? What if I tell my friend, that my new TV is really good? What if I tell it to 10 of my friends? What if I send an email to everyone I know, saying, that my new TV is great? Would you investigate, if the TV manufacturer paid me or not? How exactly would you do it? Or did they gave me a discount on the TV? I wish you could see, that you can not ban advertising, without banning free speech. It would be also great to ban lying in media, right?
  - zentiggr 6y ago
    Well, you're not a billboard, or any other fixed sign broadcasting to everyone that walks by, or pushing your opinion at literally everyone you meet, so while you may have an opinion, it's not being forced on everyone who comes in proximity to you. As opposed to the billboards, building side adverts, and web site ads that are just splatting out at anyone that happens by.
- Super_Jambo 6y ago
  My idea for this is that we should nationalise advertising & product discovery. Over consumption is killing the planet, processed foods are destroying our health, user engagement hacking is eroding free will. Powerful companies like HSBC manipulate the press through the pressure of their ad-spend. [1] But obviously we can't just see the vast advertising industry and all it supports vanish overnight. However, we could nationalize them. We could pay last years ad-spend to market healthy food, low consumption & social connections. Then next year we could cut spending a little, say 90%. If companies can't survive without the economic dead weight of advertising then they shouldn't exist. It's not like they're required for product discovery in the information technology age. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-telegraph-hsbc-coverage-fraud-readers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-t...
- wincy 6y ago
  My city (Overland Park, Kansas) definitely has some sort of restrictions on billboards [0]. I looked it up, if you're super interested on page 230 it indicates that there's a density restriction (1200 feet from already existing billboards) and a zoning restriction against residential (400 feet). They also can't be on top of a building, or over 30 feet tall. I can't really think of any billboards nearby, so I think this effectively restricts the billboards to maybe very busy interstates and nowhere else. Going across state lines into Missouri is very noticeable because there's billboards everywhere. [0] http://online.encodeplus.com/regs/overlandpark-ks/export2doc.aspx?pdf=1&tocid=018 http://online.encodeplus.com/regs/overlandpark-ks/export2doc...
bregma 6y ago
I despair it will be the opposite. To enhance revenues in the face of recent unexpected expenses due to global pandemic, government will embrace advertising to enhance revenues. Not just government web sites, but all government communications and services. Finding the right line to fill in when completing your tax form will become a game of Where's Waldo among the print ads. Want to see the beauty of a national park... it's right there behind the electronic billboards taking advantage of the proximity detectors in your phone and linked to user tracking. There is too much lucre at stake for the government to be allowed to regulate. The government is vulnerable and needs to be supported by the advertising lobby. After all, it's what they do.
ancymon 6y ago
I think one of the reasons for user tracking is fraud detection. The moment you get rid off it, nobody would be willing to "risk" advertising on smaller, unknown websites. So maybe such ban would make monetization for small publishers much harder.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Fraud is only a problem for advertisements based on CPM/CPC. Time-based advertisements (pay X to have your ad displayed here for Y time) tracked by overall purchases (using an unique link) don't have a "fraud" problem given that the only way to boost the ad's effectiveness is to literally buy the product multiple times and pay for it.

raxxorrax 6y ago

Agreed and advertisers do agree too. They themselves demanded controversial content to be removed while their ads are showing, society demanding the same is in line with that thought. They do pay for many internet services, but I think the negative aspects outbalance the monetary advantages.

secondcoming 6y ago
> They themselves demanded controversial content to be removed I don't think this is necessarily true. They demanded that their ads are not shown next to controversial content. An unintended consequence of this is that the definition of 'controversial' is fluid and open to abuse. So if a pressure-group deems your thoughts and opinions 'controversial' you get no ads. And if you get no ads there's no real incentive for YT or whatever to serve your content; they're not charities. Your only other option is to self-host. So advertisers and indirectly control the societal narrative, and that should be troubling.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Youtube can just set the conditions with their market share. Content creators draw the attention they sell to advertisers. They made the mistake that they did comply and now get overwhelmed with further demands. They could have just had a "take it or leave it" strategy and I am very sure advertisers would just have continued to pay, because it benefits them too. Youtube set the precedent for advertisers demanding editorial control on content, it is purely on their misbehavior we have this problem. Because now advertisers can be made responsible where their ads are shown and what is seen next to them.

taurath 6y ago

CCPA for me is, for all its faults and ambiguities, to me a great start in that you must provide controls, so eventually maybe the controls can have teeth behind them. The definition of “operational” data though is where it currently falls flat. The article speaks mostly of telemetry rather than ad delivery - however “native” ads delivered in content streams such as thru Reddit’s newer APIs are harder to filter. The only reason client side tracking was a thing in the first place was that the browser data was the easiest way to fingerprint users. We’re entering the age that happens after the market consolidation - the squeeze. Hoping the eventual alternative shows itself soon.

h1fra 6y ago

It always bother me that ads on tv/paper/radio are highly controlled, regulated (at least in France), with maximum time and restricted content. But ads in internet are just wild! You can have 1 minute of ads for less than 10 minutes of content, plus all the banners, sponsored content etc... I wish the Europe would regulate this and impose a maximum exposition time for ads, like we have for tv. (e.g: in France 6-9 minutes per hour in average)

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I believe (but don't quote me on this) that the existing laws SHOULD also apply to online ads, but for some restrictions maybe. It may take a lawsuit for e.g. youtube to start following these restrictions.
- FriedrichN 6y ago
  IANAL but that's usually not the case for most European countries, these guidelines are mostly specific to radio and TV.
ricardo81 6y ago
It seems to me anecdotally as a free YouTube user that the number of ads I see on there have been cranked up. As often as once every 3 minutes. I remind myself that I'm not paying anything for their hosting and serving of the video, but it still grinds... particularly so when it's the likes of BBC content which as a UK license payer, has already been paid for and is being monetised on there.
- ratww 6y ago
  I've seen a lot of individuals reporting the same thing. Also, it seems almost every video has ads now. I wonder if those videos you see in landing pages will get them too. Also, it started showing a "please sign up" to me every hour or so, which is not only disruptive but also buggy, as it forces me to reload the page, losing the position of the video.
  - 6y ago

BlueTemplar 6y ago

> why no home router makers have put ad and track filtering in their products is slightly mystifying French ISP "Free" used to vocally advertise their router ad blocker (consumer interest). They also vocally claimed to be the underdog and fought YouTube then Netflix (huge data volume interconnections are expensive). If I'm not mistaken, in all the 3 cases they ended up "settling"

SCNP 6y ago
While it would be awesome to have hardware that did the heavy lifting, I don't like the incentives for commercial products anywhere near the ad-space. It would only be a matter of time before a firmware update allows "permitted" ads through because the advertiser paid the proper sum. It may be time to finally set up my pi-hole.
- mguerville 6y ago
  I set up NextDNS instead of a pi-hole, because frankly pi-hole seemed a bit daunting as a non technical user (if not setup, proper maintenance) and it's been great, between that and uBlock Origin I feel well shielded, and when I use my wife's iPad with neither of these I'm appalled at what the internet has become ad-wise
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    I was using PiHole and switched to NextDNS and it’s been fantastic. It’s way easier to maintain.
  - samoa42 6y ago
    just beware that pi-hole and nextdns are not the same thing, albeit they maybe solve the same problem on the user end. but nextdns is suffering from the same problem as every other centralised service (beeing a prime point for siphoning information on a large scale and a easy target for manipulation)
    - mguerville 6y ago

amadeuspagel 6y ago

> It's kind of a tech company too, but in a good-enough sort of way rather than the "hey, we invented the transistor" sort of way. Really? PageRank is not an invention like the transistor?

baq 6y ago
not sure if you're trolling but yeah, it isn't. algorithms are discovered. inventions require physical objects, so all software patents end up being 'method and apparatus'.
- tantalor 6y ago
  Tell that to RSA.

pjc50 6y ago

The UK does have control on web advertising, but it's pretty limited: https://www.asa.org.uk/news/regulation-of-online-advertising.html https://www.asa.org.uk/news/regulation-of-online-advertising...

xkde 6y ago

Conversely, we could try not fiddling with it: https://youtu.be/6txA3pI0xJI https://youtu.be/6txA3pI0xJI And playing minesweeper.

oblio 6y ago
Why? Because it will self-regulate? Because people will vote with their wallets? That's how we got leaded gasoline for 60+ years.
- xkde 6y ago
  Leaded gasoline and the Internet are hardly comparable. But go ahead and make straw man arguments.
  - oblio 6y ago
    Corporate malfeasance with corporate malfeasance. How are they not comparable? The incentives are not aligned: corporate profit vs the commons.
    - xkde 6y ago
      Dumping chemicals in shared rivers/air vs placing ads in a privately owned space that users have the option of visiting. Not comparable. The fact that more people use Gmail than Protonmail / others is a testament to their willingness to trade their eyeballs on ads for a service they don't have to spend their monetary resources on. It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance from the largest, unbreakable corporate entity (ie. the government)?
      - Nextgrid 6y ago
        > users have the option of visiting Except that advertisers' activities goes beyond just showing ads. They stalk you, collect data and build a profile which will persist forever & be used down the line against you in one way or another (either intentionally by those advertisers or by someone else if the data falls into the wrong hands) long after you've left the website.

lordnacho 6y ago

If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It's as if there's a line between actively lying ("Studies show that men who buy this car will find many many women attracted to them") and just putting it there suggestively, for some as yet undescribed but working cognitive bias to do its magic. Some advertisers even make a joke out of it, eg the Lynx ads where the dude is thronged by a huge horde of women. It's a cliché, for a good reason. I suppose most people will just say you have free will and it's your own fault for thinking what was suggested, but I sense this is more of a grey zone than most people are willing to admit. How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion?

jasode 6y ago
>humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? [...] How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion? I'm (genuinely) surprised that someone with your financial background knowledge would write those sentences about "free market". I think you already know that the "free" in "free market" means free (as practically possible) from government controls. (The first sentence in wikipedia.[1]) E.g., the baker decides to bake 10 loaves of bread instead of a government official telling him a quota. Yes, I understand that many people use another definition of "free market" to mean "theoretical and impossible to exist market" -- because it would require all humans to be all-knowledgeable Laplace's Demon[2] and impervious to hidden influences. Ok, I get that language usage evolves and labels get diluted and therefore, "free market" is meaningless. In that case, what _do_ we call imperfect humans trading without government dictating quotas to us? I'm open to alternative labels. EDIT: people are misunderstanding my comment to lordnacho. I'm not against government intervention to limit bad effects of ads. I'm dissecting lordnacho's rhetoric. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon
- 6y ago

marcus_holmes 6y ago

I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers. I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.

ddevault 6y ago
Strong agree. Advertising should be outlawed entirely. Or rather, corporate propaganda should be outlawed. Psychologically manipulating people for profit is horrible, I cannot comprehend how it's become normalized. This is our brains on capitalism, I guess.
- ryanianian 6y ago
  If we outlaw it or have some litmus test for "propaganda-vs-ad" etc there will of course be very smart people who figure out the loopholes. Hence "influencers" and astroturfing and ads that masquerade as blogs and...even without legal restrictions in place.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    The law isn't a script. Exploiting loopholes can either result in a judge intepreting the law as designed and handing down a fine regardless, or we can work to refine the law in further legislation. Just because it's difficult and someone will try to circumvent it doesn't mean we shouldn't work on it.
- jancsika 6y ago
  I guess you're getting downvoted because your statement is rather broad. But narrowing a bit to the feedback loop between data collected by the ad machine and the next ad you see based on that and ongoing data collection-- if Las Vegas casino games are regulated then we can certainly regulate that dangerous practice.

coldcode 6y ago

If there was a non gamefiable system for allowing people to pay a small amount automatically for reading content, and that system allowed you to specify you did not want to pay, which then told the website this and allowed it to show ads instead, otherwise they got most of the small amount, what would that do to advertising? Ads exist to (1) pay for free content (2) try to get you to buy/try/etc the thing being advertised. If (1) were taken care of, would (2) even exist? Or would websites just do both and piss everyone off?

varispeed 6y ago

If think ad targeting should be illegal, because if you know who is going to see your ad, you can easily manipulate them into signing up or buying the product by exploiting characteristics that person may have.

krono 6y ago

Internet ads as we see them today are absolutely disastrous for people with ADHD. When even people who don't have to deal with this disability are finding these ads way too distracting, it can't be hard to imagine just how bad it is for us invalids. Taking away my ability to use an ad blocker - like what Google is trying to do - would be like removing all wheelchair ramps. It would have a massive negative impact on my quality of life, and would have far reaching consequences for my productivity levels. Meta: Posted this earlier in response to a top level comment but figured it's better on its own.

Zeing0Ch 6y ago

I don't think that any government should ever make such fine-grained regulation. Telling the most innovative companies on the planet how they supposed to function is a recipe for disaster. There will never be another Google-like company if this becomes law that's for sure. Also of course people have control already, they can chose not to visit websites with ads on them.

superkuh 6y ago

Legal controls? You mean you want to bring in government regulation so that all the players down to the smallest personal website will have to do all the things required of even the most giant corporations? So that once this onerous system of centralized control is set up it'll soon be bought and co-opted by the very people it was meant to regulate originally? No. We've already seen this game play out over and over, and recently too! It's not like GDPR has stopped the big corporations from monetizing information about you. It's just made it so that WHOIS lookups are now worthless and don't even contain contact emails.

Supermancho 6y ago
Imagine a system that's so technologically complex, that lawmakers can't even create laws to codify the system, much less controls on the dependent systems. We already have that in the W3C browsers. This idea of "legal controls" on advertising will have to start with well understood systems before online advertising is affected, imo.

eimrine 6y ago

Europe has legal controls over cookies and it is nothing good: more banners having buttons doing something I do not know (so I ignore them despite using 10-20% of viewport for viewing the content). I think web does not need any legal control.

Nextgrid 6y ago
The original "cookie law" was indeed badly designed, however the GDPR is sane. The only problem (which causes the banners & annoyances) is that it's not being enforced (the aforementioned annoyances are actually against the regulation).

x0hm 6y ago

In "The World Beyond Your Head" by Matthew B. Crawford, the author introduces the idea of an "attentional commons". The gist of this is that there are shared resources in the world. Air and water are examples. We recognize them as shared resources, and we recognize that without regulations, some people would use them in ways that make them unusable for others. Crawford makes a pitch for treating "attention" as a resource, and asserts that folks should have a right not to be addressed by mechanized means. It's a very good read, especially for software developers, phenomenologists, or cognitive science folks. Additionally, doesn't advertising go directly against the notion of a "free market"? The idea that "capitalism breeds competition, and competition creates quality" goes out the window when huge advertising budgets urge you to buy some cheap commodity product over a well-made product with a smaller advertising budget.

janci 6y ago

The only legislation on ads we need is right to block ads.

mrloba 6y ago

How about we fix the underlying problem: how to earn money without advertising? The issue right now is that subscribing to 100s of different services is both annoying and expensive. What if you could subscribe to a single service, which then would compensate the different services you use based on how much you use them? Sort of like how Spotify compensates artists based on number of listens. Quite easy to solve technically I think, but of course hard to solve socially.

tehwebguy 6y ago
Wait who is the org that will pay websites and services based on how much time I use them?
- mrloba 6y ago
  Hopefully not a single org, or any org. But like I said, it's not easy to solve socially. The main point is to somehow get paid without advertising (Which already exists, it's just that people won't pay individually for every service on the internet. At least that's my assumption).
  - ev1 6y ago
    The hardest part is probably how you would handle payments. I'm happy to pay for things like newspaper site subscriptions - I just don't want to give my card or any identifying information to known spammers, 30-days-to-unsubscribe data-sellers, and hostile companies that refuse to allow you to cancel subscriptions other than calling them during a 1 hour timespan once a week. I'd be happy to throw $0.25 at a single article with no advertising or tracking and without leaking any identifying information at all - that means I have balance stored somehow, and I do not want to give even an email address [they've already shown that they cannot be trusted with it, much less anything else]. For example, NYT allows Californians purely because of the law that requires you to be able to sign up online -> cancel online only has this turned on if you have a CA billing address and CA geoip. This is hostile, asshole design. The code is there already, the implementation is there already, they just require everyone in every other state to call in during tight hours if not absolutely forced to via regulation. Blizzard/EA: Call of Duty has an option to opt out of selling your personal information. This option is only visible to be modified at all (not disabled - just gone entirely) if you are on a CA IP. If you ever log in once from another machine or another location, it's reset to retroactively sell all information and also not shown on the options menu. Excessively heavy handed legal controls are needed because nobody can fucking behave.

nathias 6y ago

The way we make our money makes all the difference for our cultures and general way of life, it seems that we have chosen poorly and we have little recourse. In a world of add-salesmen inoffensiveness becomes the chief value. This value scheme has become central to the modern left and right poles of politics, but instead of affirming or negating it, we should just regulate its conditions out of existence. If we don't achieve this (and we won't), what comes next is an even more aggressive affirmation of inoffensiveness, which will give to an open affirmation of censorship in the name of preventing "harm" and "exclusion" aided by technology. When censorship was historically affirmed, it was to remove the 'wrong' opinion, but what was right was very clearly presented, however, because now the primary value is negatively determined there is no way it can be totalized and presented as something known. This indetermination of negativity, coupled with a new power of technology that can exert control in a much more detailed way, accompanied by a general trend of digitalization of all human activity will make censorship ubiquitous and insidious.

DoubleGlazing 6y ago

What we have today isn't really advertising in my opinion. To me advertising should be fairly passive and loosely targetted. Basically putting car ads on a motoring website or serving local interest ads based on your location. What the web has given us is a form of "thought manipulation". It has gone beyond just trying to make us aware of a product in to manipulating us to make irrational decisions. The idea of the likes of Google and other ad brokers constantly researching web users actions in order to get inside their heads really bothers me. It's more than creepy, its disturbing.

Bakary 6y ago

One thing that has always bothered me about advertising is that to work in that sphere you have to be more soulless than usual, even if it can have good outcomes or make many services possible. You have to spend 40+ hours a week coming up with ways to exploit human psychological weakness. You can dress it up in many other ways but that's the core unavoidable aspect of it. Only a tiny minority of the work goes into ads that simply state of a product's existence, and these often serve to make physical spaces uglier to live in.