20 ms·

> 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 d

> 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 cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.

margalabargala 2y ago
> If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. This would result in a better world still, without the authoritarian system you describe. No need to get it perfect the first try, just start small. For an example of this in action, drive through any of the US states that do not allow billboards.
- abracadaniel 2y ago
  Many complex problems can become easier if we can accept that the solutions can be malleable and designed to adapt. We just don’t really apply that to laws for the most part.
  - chgs 2y ago
    I don’t know if it’s America or tech people but online discourse of legal systems from American tech people seems to treat laws as code, something to interpret as written rather than the meaning. Loopholes are celebrated as being clever and are impossible to patch. This is quite alien to most of the world.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      Although it should be said the economic success of the Americans hitherto is also quite foreign to the rest of the world; and driven mainly by their legal quirks.
      - idle_zealot 2y ago
        My understanding is that our success was largely down to the Marshal Plan. The claim that it's due to legal quirks sounds dubious.
        roenxi 2y ago
        That seems rather focused on one policy that was big in the 50s. The Marshal Plan was great but that isn't something the modern US seems to be capable of - since around Vietnam I think was the change. It has been a good 50 years where the US just breaks stuff and leaves it broken. Modern prosperity is caused by modern policy. I've seen some reasonable theorising that income basically comes from how easy it is to do business (thinking especially of https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation). Which is linked in no small way to the cultural factors chgs pointed out - the most vibrant and high income industry in the world is also the one that sees laws impeding them as a problem that can be overcome. The attitude of doing things that create wealthy even if NIMBYs object is an attitude that leads to wealth creation. Strange but true. Not the only factor, the political strength of the opposition matters a lot too.
        bakuninsbart 2y ago
        The book Why Nations Fail makes a pretty strong argument for the core feature of successful societies to be strong institutions with low perceived corruption. Sensible laws that are upheld equally are a part of that. The US in particular benefits from an absurd amount of resources (not least of which is land), a perfectly safe geographic position, the global language and an immigrant culture. Basically able to coattail the British after independence, the destruction of much of Eurasia during WWII cemented its position as first. And great diplomacy, including the Marshal Plan, enabled the US to create an international system with many benefits and natural synergies with its inherent strengths.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Legalities don't drive profits. If anything the US was simply lucky in thr 50s to not be war torn and rebuilding it's cities post war. The only thing special is our geography and history. It's really hard to launch an attack unless you're in Canada and Mexico. So the US smartly made treaties and agreeemtns instead of repeating the bloody history Asia and the now EU went through as they constantly battled neighbors. Only Australia has such a similar advantage and instead they had to war with nature's deadliest critters trying to kill them (they arguably lost).
    - khana 2y ago
      [dead]
  - margalabargala 2y ago
    We absolutely do, and in fact doing so is the primary job of many of the higher courts in the US.
- flakeoil 2y ago
  But how do you define advertising. What about social media influencers? How to prevent someone from paying people to promote stuff? What if it is forbidden and then only a bad government can promote their agenda, but anyone else cannot.
  - dismalpedigree 2y ago
    Make paying to promote stuff is what the author asserted. If it also results in all the social media influencers behind bars, then its a double-win.
  - margalabargala 2y ago
    We don't define advertising, we describe the sorts of things we would like to see go away, enumerate some of the easiest (like billboards), and amend in the future as newer manifestations become clear. This isn't some piece of rigidly-defined software instruction that also is somehow write-once execute-forever amend-never.
jononor 2y ago
One would never reach zero. And it would be challenging both to define and police laws against advertising. But to get to a world with drastically less advertisements than today seems doable.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  So we want the government to decide what is advertising and propaganda? Is telling people about the wrongs of government propaganda? Is going door to door about have you made Jesus the head of your life propaganda?
  - jychang 2y ago
    Yeah? The government defines what is murder, defines what is tax evasion, and defines tons of other stuff already? Some states already have laws against billboards?
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      How would you like the government deciding some cause they didn’t agree with is advertising? If you live in a conservative state, what are the chances that they say advocacy for Planned Parenthood is advertising and say that advocacy for pro-life is freedom of religion? And how would that work over the Internet? Are you going to block foreign websites? I can give you a real world example. Florida requires age verification for porn sites. Sites not based in the US including the ones owned by MindGeek just ignored it.
      - amelius 2y ago
        We can start by banning ads for products and services that cost money. > And how would that work over the Internet? Are you going to block foreign websites? We just address the big platforms. No need to be exhaustive in the first attempt.
        JustExAWS 2y ago
cogman10 2y ago
> that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty. What? How? Advertising isn't a good or service. About the only way I could see it economically being damaging is if you subscribe to the "broken windows" theory of economics.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  Advertising tells me what goods and services are available, and at what prices. This is a service.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    So does a search engine and 3rd party reviewers. Further, any store will be pretty highly incentivized to provide a quick list of goods or services offered and likely the prices (most already do this). I don't need the same ad repeated 20 times to know that Ford sells cars and trucks.
    - grues-dinner 2y ago
      > I don't need the same ad repeated 20 times to know that Ford sells cars and trucks. Not only that, but the Ford ad of a vehicle driving cinematically across a landscape before disgorging a laughing and implausibly photogenic family does nothing to inform you about the relative merits of the vehicle. Anything specific mentioned in the advert is as likely to be flimflam or only technical truth as not, so nothing mentioned in the advert can be taken as useful purchase-informing fact without further research.
      - cogman10 2y ago
        Exactly. There's an economic negative to advertising, particularly in the US, because "puffery" is legal. That gives advertisers nearly complete free reign to lie about stuff (especially if they put in a small white text disclaimer that says the things you are seeing and hearing aren't really true.)
  - 2y ago
jongjong 2y ago
Advertising is unsolicited content which attempts to trigger or nudge a behaviour. There should be a limit on the quantity of advertising. Limited to like 100 people a day on average. We already have anti-spam laws. There would still be advertising but it would be from people from your own communities instead of big corporations.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  > Advertising is unsolicited content which attempts to trigger or nudge a behaviour. So I'm listening to the radio, and one minute I'm hearing someone on NPR (or an equivalent public broadcaster) explaining how to make my back healthier; the next minute there's someone trying to convince me that some product will make my back healthier. Which one is advertising and which one is not?
  - viraptor 2y ago
    > explaining HOW TO make my back healthier > that SOME PRODUCT will make my back healthier. Is it really that tricky?
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      It is. The advice from the expert includes recommendations to buy a type of product, perhaps without a brand name.
      - dwaltrip 2y ago
        Ads are inauthentic speech someone is paid to express. If entity A pays entity B to say or display their words or content, it's an ad. This is not an impossible problem. It doesn't need to be perfect, and we can iterate.
        twoodfin 2y ago
        Or, instead of trying to decide which speech is good and which is bad, we could let anyone say anything they want, across any medium the cost of which they are willing to bear.
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
What you can do relatively easily is to control the physical format of advertising. For example, consider how rare "billboards" are outside of the USA. Or towns in various places that prohibit signage that is not in the same plane as the edge of the building (i.e. no sticky-outy signs). Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge cases that are tricky, but overall the situation doesn't seem too fraught.
- cavisne 2y ago
  Billboards being rare outside of the US seems quite incorrect. The developing world is full of billboards, and places in Europe like Milan have some wild Samsung billboards.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    OK, let me restate that: there are places (even a few within the USA) that have very few or no billboards, because they are banned.
    - anjel 2y ago
      Good luck getting e.g. Formula 1 to take down their sponsorship banners.
      - kristiandupont 2y ago
        You don't think F1 would follow the law?
        LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
        Do you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Ecclestone#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Ecclestone#Controversie...
michaelhoney 2y ago
If you can’t imagine it, try a bit harder. We can build a better world, but it takes effort.
- baumy 2y ago
  Would you be interested in making a comment that adds to the conversation, instead of whatever this was? The person you're replying to identified constraints that prevent him from imagining it - any system for restricting advertisements will either be permissive enough that it's ineffective, or strict enough that it will be abused for political reasons. This sounds like a reasonable concern. Can you imagine a realistic way around this issue?
- jjk166 2y ago
  The problem is the harder you try to imagine it, the less it looks like a better world. Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy. Getting rid of a billboard for something I am never going to buy sounds great, but it kinda sucks for the person who actually is interested in the thing that billboard is advertising. Even if there were some type of advertising that provided no benefit to any part of society, the restriction on the freedom to communicate those advertisements is something that harms all of us. Sometimes the part of building a better world that takes the most effort is recognizing where we already have.
  - polygamous_bat 2y ago
    > Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy I would argue that paid advertisement is a force distorting free speech. In a town square, if you can pay to have the loudest megaphone to speak over everyone else, soon everyone would either just shut up and leave or not be able to speak properly, leaving your voice the only voice in the conversation. Why should money be able to buy you that power?
    - chii 2y ago
      > Why should money be able to buy you that power? why shouldn't it? If somebody believes that their message is important enough to outbid everybody else, their message ought to be the one that is displayed.
shadowgovt 2y ago
Even if the authoritarianism to enforce it weren't by itself undesirable, banning advertising creates a situation where incumbents (known names) have a significant advantage over new entrants to a market. It's worth analyzing why a society wants that and who benefits from it.
- Ray20 2y ago
  >banning advertising creates a situation where incumbents (known names) have a significant advantage over new entrants to a market. The article almost explicitly states that this is precisely the goal. We all understand who those populists in 2016 are, who "bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences". So I think we are not talking about authoritarianism here, but full-fledged totalitarianism. Such a policy is a powerful lever of control, allowing government to obtain even more levers. And in the end people still vote "wrongly" (spoiler: they are voting "wrongly" not because of some Russian advertisement on facebook), but the government at that point will not care anymore how people vote because that will not affect anything.
SoftTalker 2y ago
As a fantasy it sounds nice but it immediately hits the wall of the 1st amendment.
- cookingrobot 2y ago
  How is that? There are lots of things that are illegal that are just “speech”. Fraud, threats, impersonation, etc etc.
- wskish 2y ago
  Amplified messaging from corporations is not the same as the free speech of individuals. Just as we disallow advertising for cigarettes and hard liquor on TV, a democratic society should be free to select other classes of messages that corporations are not permitted to amplify into public spaces.
  - twoodfin 2y ago
    Hard liquor ads are all over (e.g.) broadcasts of NFL games. Cigarette advertising “bans” are not legislated, IIRC, but a result of the various consolidated settlements of the 1990s-era lawsuits against the tobacco companies. They’re essentially voluntary, and it’s not obvious that a genuine ban would survive constitutional scrutiny. It might: Commercial speech is among the least protected forms of speech. But at some point a line is crossed: Painting “Read the New York Times” on the side of a barn you own is bread & butter freedom of expression.
    - TomasBM 2y ago
      Outside the US (e.g., Europe), advertising bans for tobacco and liquor can work quite well. Sure, there will always be bad cases and loopholes - even bans on murder don't work 100% - but there's a reason "bans" are still a viable mechanism.
    - const_cast 2y ago
      > But at some point a line is crossed: Painting “Read the New York Times” on the side of a barn you own is bread & butter freedom of expression. Okay, then don't make that illegal. I don't understand this mentality of "everything is the same as everything else so we can't do anything". Sure, it's all just scale. But scale matters. Scale is why I can do a science experiment at home and it's cool, but I can't make a nuclear warhead. Seems for just about everything we've been able to find that line and work around it. This "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" approach to society is toxic, and we need to stop.
dietr1ch 2y ago
> 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. I've been on the advertising, is an evil parasite around useful transactions bandwagon for a while and thought this was really hard to define properly. So far my best take is around that what's good is being discoverable instead of something that you run into. This allows people to do what they want, without the evil side of unconsciously or in-competitively driving them to your business/deals.
mystified5016 2y ago
There's two kinds of advertising: your local mom and pop running a labor day sale in the local paper, and megacorps spending billions of dollars advertising soda and roblock lootcrates or whatever to kids, or plastering every square inch of public and private space with maximally attention-seeking posters and billboards. One of these is good and one is bad.
- aldanor 2y ago
  That's the tough part - drawing precise line. There's lots of points between megacorps and local mnps.
  - Tempest1981 2y ago
    The line could be adjusted, and would need to be as people exploit loopholes. If humans can't decide, we can train a LLM to be the arbiter.
Aeolun 2y ago
I think the article mentions banning “sold advertising”, which seems like a fair way to go about it. You can still advertise your own stuff, but you cannot pay a marketplace to do it for you any more. Advertising would by necessity become a lot more local.
- cyberax 2y ago
  How would I advertise my app? Or my TV brand?
  - Tempest1981 2y ago
    Reputable review sites are better than random advertisements
    - etempleton 2y ago
      How do those sites make money if advertising doesn’t exist? A major challenge in journalism is because of the collapse in value of banner ads. No one but the very largest newspapers have sustainable businesses in the United States and they only do because of the critical mass they have reached with subscribers.
      - polygamous_bat 2y ago
        Good information is valuable. When internet didn’t exist people paid good money for newspaper and magazines because they provided good information which people found valuable.
      - halper 2y ago
        I subscribe to a magazine that publishes tests and reviews of everything from lawn fertiliser to spices, via vacuums and mobile phones. It costs money and I trust that they are not bribed. It seems rather certain an end to advertising would mean the death of lots of low-quality "media".
    - cyberax 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
whall6 2y ago
Agree with this entirely. In fact, I would go as far as saying if advertising was illegal, then expressing opinions would be illegal. Everything is an advertisement.
- GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
  Reductio ad absurdum? I want to live in a world where we understand the difference between opinion and sales.
- naasking 2y ago
  There's a fairly clear line between opinion and advertisement. For instance, one is paid for and the other is given freely.
  - whall6 2y ago
    What does it mean to be paid? Money? Goods? Services? Favors?
    - naasking 2y ago
      Income, assets and capital gains are clearly defined in the tax code.
freeamz 2y ago
I don't know about 'advertising', but Bahai don't allow campaigning when running for leadership position. I would imagine it would be some where along line of that. It encourage action speakers louder than words. With all the modern techniques (used by neurosciences) in the modern advertising is pretty all entrainment and brain washing at this point any way. So no harm in making all that illegal. I'm pretty ok with a world with no advertising, and just function by word of mouth and network of trust.
rayiner 2y ago
> And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty. Does advertising confer an economic advantage?
naasking 2y ago
> you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty. I don't see how you reached this conclusion, unless you think advertising/propaganda yields bet positive outcomes more than net negative, which seems contentious. Here's one way it could be false: the wisdom of the crowds only really works when groups of people independently reach their own conclusions, because people who don't understand an issue are randomly distributed around the correct answer and so they all cancel each other out, leaving only the people who do understand an issue to cluster around the correct decision. Propaganda/advertising works directly against this, thus undercutting the usefulness of the wisdom of crowds.
GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good. I spent 5+ years living in Hawaii, where just billboards are illegal. I can’t quantify the effect but qualitatively, it’s something I dearly miss in the concrete hell of Southern California.
the_cat_kittles 2y ago
hey why try to do anything ever, people will just find a way around it and it will be worse than if we did nothing. lets make murder legal, fewer people will get killed i guess
patcon 2y ago
We cant define the beginning and end of human life/consciousness, and we've regulated it for thousands of years. That it is hard to define does not make it impossible to control
guerrilla 2y ago
This is just the nirvana fallacy. We need to do our best.
nazgul17 2y ago
Perhaps just banning algorithmic advertising would be enough?
beefnugs 2y ago
There is no reason it has to be so immoral, annoying, and evil. There could be a whole gamified system where people who choose to voluntarily participate can find things they want to buy from people eager to sell
camgunz 2y ago
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 on me, yadda yadda. It's so transparent to me now, and I've passed this curse onto you. Nothing else in law works this way. No definition is ironclad. This is what legislators, agencies, and courts are for. We all know this.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pembrook 2y ago
  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 decentralized market regulation of that scarcity. Instead of something that attempts to land on fairness (even if imperfect), no market at all guarantees unfairness. Advertising puts a price on the scarce commodity of attention in broad strokes, and it not always, but generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising). I know, please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes. Like all markets, we should regulate advertising to ensure it doesn’t get out of control. But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society. Hence why this is a non-serious, silly idea.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    What is a "natural market"? Please explain with examples from nature. Your argument begs the question. Attention is indeed scarce, but that's because ad tech has created an attention economy. Assuming that advertising is the best use of human attention is - how can I put this politely? - really quite eccentric.
rglullis 2y ago
> How do you even define advertising? You don't define "advertising". You look for things that advertisers do and see if they can be made illegal or unprofitable. Formula 1 cars used to have displays for tobacco products. At one point, the law in Europe started saying "you can not do that", so tobacco advertisements disappeared.
fmbb 2y ago
> you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What is your evidence that there is any economic advantage at all to have unregulated advertising? I'm fairly sure advertising is regulated in all sovereign states. And I am also quite certain that the jurisdictions in which gambling advertisement is illegal fare better economically than those in which it is illegal. It only makes sense: gambling is not productive, the less of it you have the better your population spend their money on productive things, the more advertising you have the more people spend on gambling (otherwise what is the point of advertising?), if you forbid gamling advertising there will be less gambling advertising (if not, what is your complaint even?). Nothing about this statement of yours makes sense.
caseyy 2y ago
> How do you even define advertising? Almost everyone can tell when they’re being advertised to. And almost everyone can tell when they advertise. Effectiveness of such bans would depend on enforcement, the definition is clear enough.
- halgir 2y ago
  > the definition is clear enough. It really isn't though. There's so many different forms that we can't reduce it to "I know it when I see it" territory and depend on case-by-case enforcement. Do we ban outdoor billboards? Product placement? Content marketing? Public relations? Sponsor logos on sports uniforms? Brand logos on retail clothing? Mailing lists? I do love the idea, but doubt its feasibility. Implementation would have to be meticulous, and I expect the advertising industry would always be one step ahead in an endless race of interpretation. We can still try to curtail the most disruptive forms though, we don't have to destroy all advertising at once to make a positive difference.
  - caseyy 2y ago
    I'd say don't let the perfect be the enemy of good. Banning 80% of existing advertisement practices would practically achieve all the goals bans strive for.
  - shruggedatlas 2y ago
    Outdoor billboards, product placement, sponsor logos on sports uniforms - yes Content marketing, public relations, mailing lists - no "we don't have to destroy all advertising at once to make a positive difference"
LightBug1 2y ago
No public facing advertising. At all. No sponsored advertising. At all. If advertising "skirts through the loopholes", fine - at least we'll recognise it as underground (like darknet now). The liberal version, I don't even understand how you got there so won't comment. That was wild. And you seem to ignore the issue the OP mentions about not being able to unilaterally disarm. It's easy if you try. But you won't try ... what a shame.
- singpolyma3 2y ago
  Ban farmer's markets
  - dismalpedigree 2y ago
    How do farmer’s markets run afoul of this proposal? Perhaps there is advertising by the market to tell people to come, that can be eliminated. Once you are at the market there are only individual booths advertising their wares, which is fine because its not a 3rd party.
ajuc 2y ago
There was almost no advertising in my country when I was 7. I live in Poland and till 1989 it was communist puppet state of USSR (not through our choice, obviously, so the moment we could - we noped out of it). There was no point advertising because there was no competition, all the companies were nationalized and no matter how well or badly they did - their employees earned the same. If you persuaded people to buy your washing powder instead of the other available washing powder - that just means the queues for your washing powder will be longer. There was A LOT of communist and anti western propaganda tho. But no advertising is perfectly possible.
- simne 2y ago
  I live in Ukraine, and we still suffer from soviet limitations on advertisement and entrepreneurs. Every time when govt and parliament need to make some urgent reform, nobody could predict, what will really happen - as they could just raise taxes, or deform some industry with some unreal regulations, and only in few cases implement some adequate, for example synchronize with EU regulations. For example, for banks appear problem, people avoid to pay credits, so need some enforcement - powers approved confiscation of property to pay credit, but with exceptions of unprotected people, so bank cannot confiscate from pensioners, when child registered in property, and few others, so literally huge percent of citizens now protected from banks, and this new law is step back, not progress.
kmacdough 2y ago
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? Seems you're insistent on letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is precisely why judges exist. It would not be difficult to define Ads well enough to cover 99% of current advertising. Sure there will be gray areas. Advertisers will adapt. But it would make it profoundly more expensive, difficult and risky. I'm not sure I understand a concrete economic argument other than "anything which makes it harder for businesses to be wildly profitable off minimal value hurts the economy". But that only really holds of you define the economy by things like GDP, which really just capture how wildly profitable companies are and have almost no bearing on quality of life for the people; in other words, the argument is circular.
- singpolyma3 2y ago
  A sign on the front of a store is advertising. If we ban these how will you even know what stores there are downtown?
  - dismalpedigree 2y ago
    The author specifically mentioned paid 3rd party. So an individual/business can “advertise” all they want for their services, but paying other entities to “speak” for them is not allowed. Yes, i can find all kinds of loopholes too. Thats what judges are for.
    - Nemi 2y ago
      I’ll play. Assume paying for others to advertise for you is illegal. What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right? What about them wearing a sign so they don’t have to shout? Driving with a sign on a car? Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that. How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line? I am not an advertising apologist. I hate ads with the power of a thousand suns. I use an ad blocker. But this idea of making advertising illegal is just a non-starter. It goes against the basic tenants of freedom of speech.
dukeyukey 2y ago
Eh, even if you exclude any potential side effects like that I don't see it being workable. I believe advertising as done today is _mostly_ a zero sum game, but without any advertising at all, it's going to be _really_ hard to find out about stuff!
grandempire 2y ago
I don’t think that’s the issue. Whatever advertising is, it’s clearly been industrialized by technology in ways that a) did not exist 100 years ago b) can be limited in effectiveness by removing that technology
kerkeslager 2y ago
> 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. This is just the perfect solution fallacy. Nobody in this conversation thinks there's a set of laws that would work perfectly to prevent all advertising. That doesn't mean it can't be a hell of a lot better than it is. Playing whack-a-mole with loopholes and making careful regulations to avoid inhibiting human rights is still a huge improvement over letting corporations trample human rights at will.
lambda 2y ago
In Vermont, we have banned outdoor advertising (billboards) for over 50 years with no such issues. It's hilarious that you think that advertising is actually necessary for economic prosperity. If anything, it's probably a net drain on it.
swayvil 2y ago
Advertising is a nuance of action in the informational world the way combat is a nuance of action in the physical world. We can draw the line between an aggressive blow and a firm handshake. We can distinguish that. We will figure out how to distinguish manipulatory mindfucking from regular conversation too.
Super_Jambo 2y ago
For the same reason weights and measures legislation is of course impossible. This is why every time you go to the shops you have to carry your own standard weights and balance scale! The idea that society could regulate the weight and volume of every product in every shop is simply preposterous!
tshaddox 2y ago
It’s impossible to live in a world without murder, and murder is difficult to precisely define and identify, and yet neither of those are good reasons to oppose making murder illegal.
coldtea 2y ago
>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? No ads in TV programming. No product placement in movies. No billboards. No subway or bus station advertising posters. No paid recommending of specific products. No promotional material for products - nothing with fictional elements. No web ads. No sponsored links. No social media ads. No paid reviews. (you could still do some of those covertly, with "under the table" money, but then if you caught you get fined or go to jail) No tracking consuming preferences of any kind, not even if you have an online store. Just a database of past purchases on your own store - and using them for profiling via ML should be illegal too. If people want to find out about a product, they can see it on your company's website (seeking it directly), or get a leaflet from you. In either case no dramatized / finctional / aspirational images or video should be shown. >And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty. You're removing cancer.
- jagraff 2y ago
  Are products allowed to have labels? Am I allowed to tell my friends I like a product? What if I put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it?
  - 542354234235 2y ago
    Is the company paying you to do any of those things?
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >Are products allowed to have labels? Last time I checked, a product label (on the product or on the package) is not an advertisement. It's just the name of the product and/or brand, and maybe some lines about what it does. Even if you call a product label "a sort of an advertisment" it's fine. When people complain about advertising today, do they refer to product labels? Or to their friends telling them about a product? If not, why are you bringing this up? >Am I allowed to tell my friends I like a product? What if I put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it? Sure, as long as you aren't getting paid for doing it (directly or via affiliate kickbacks). If you are, and you're discovered, you pay a fine - or go to jail. You try to paint a "it's impossible" all or nothing scenario around marginal advertising and edge cases. Doesn't matter. If we can get rid of 90% of overt advertising - tv ads, streaming ads, posters, billboads, radio jingles, that's enough, even if "you put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it".
const_cast 2y ago
This is a classic case of perfect being the enemy of good. We don't need to 1984 listen to every conversation for any hints at product endorsement. We can start with obvious things - for example, prohibiting a company from spending money on marketing. Banning ads on the air, whatever. There's levels to this. There's really evil slot machine marketing. You know, try to get people addicted to your social media and use that addiction as a way to generate profit. And then there's not so bad marketing. Like my friend telling me he likes his new pair of pants.
- brookst 2y ago
  I think you’d do better banning the sale of advertising than the purchase. Demand-side is a mess and hard to draw the line. It’s not a perfect / good thing, it’s a feasibility thing.
- programjames 2y ago
  Well, I think the point is your friend can still tell you he likes his new pair of pants, he just can't be a paid actor.
cwmoore 2y ago
“GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom“
Sloowms 2y ago
It's impossible, that's why you still see all those cigarette advertisements everywhere.
tpm 2y ago
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. It's quite easy though. Just remove incentives to advertise. Remote the possibility of profit. Will it destroy the economy? Of course, but the advertising will cease. I grew up in a communist country. There was some advertising (in TV, radio, magazines; very little outdoor), but since all the profits went to the state anyway, there was no real competition, and also often shortages, the advertising was not really serious. It didn't influence people a lot. It was harmless. Of course there was a lot of communist propaganda in the media, in the schools and workplaces, outdoor banners etc., and that is advertising too. But also this was already at the stage when nobody took it seriously anymore.
rightbyte 2y ago
>> imagine a world without advertising > I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable. What? I have world peace on my devices right now with the help of Ublock Origin. If my county bans billboards, as the county next to me have, I will see no ads except for on paper I choose to.
renox 2y ago
>> 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? Yet, in some countries advertising for tobacco or alcohol is banned, if it's possible to ban these advertising for these product why would it be impossible to ban every advertising. > And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty. Uh? You can advertise in these other nation but they also won't be able to advertise in your country, so I don't understand your point.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?" "How do you define it?" is an oft-repeated and weak argument against regulation used by online commenters who likely are defending a self-interest in maintaining tha status quo behaviour of so-called "tech" companies. Online advertising services are obviously capable of being defined as these are bought by advertisers and sold by so-called "tech" companies every day. These so-called "tech" companies define "products" and "services", offered for "free", all the time. The commercial purpose is facilitation of online advertising. This can be regulated. Before the internet was opened to the public, commercial use was prohibited. Today, HN commenters would no doubt try to suggest that defining what is and is not "commercial use" would be "impossible". But it's too late. It was already done. The uncomfortable truth for so-called "tech" companies is that _any_ regulation that affects the ability to collect data, conduct surveillance and assist the injection of advertising into people's "user experience" could have a significant impact on their "business model". Hence they try to argue _any_ regulation is unworkable. All-or-nothing. Perfect, 100% solution or nothing at all. But regulation does not have to define _all_ advertising. It may only define advertising that meets certain criteria. All-or-nothing thinking is nonsensical in this context. By analogy, when so-called "tech" companies propose alleged "solutions" for privacy issues, do they propose one solution that offers total, complete "privacy". How do we even define "privacy". What they propose is usually some incremental improvement. It is possible to limit online advertising through rules and regulations. Of course this is a unacceptable proposition for so-called "tech" companies. Their only viable "business model" depends on usurping the bandwidth of internet subscribers for surreptitious, unwanted data collection, real-time surveillance and online advertising.
casualrandomcom 2y ago
>> imagine a world without advertising > I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable. I don't know, in my country advertising tobacco products is forbidden since at least 20 years, how did they pull this magic trick?? go figure
poulsbohemian 2y ago
>How do you even define advertising? You nailed it man. My first response even to the headline let alone the article was to reflect on the first line spoken by my professor in my first marketing class: "Marketing is about educating the consumer." Advertising is just one way we attempt to do that, and taken to an extreme, I have no idea how you could ever make it stop. The article is clearly focused on one part of advertising, but even then, someone will always build a better mousetrap.
- cactacea 2y ago
  Vermont seems to have figured this out with billboards. So clearly it is not as impossible as you are making it out to be.
  - poulsbohemian 2y ago
    You are completely missing (or perhaps reinforcing my point) - billboards? Great, we'll create a fleet of vehicles with mobile advertising on the back. Outlaw that? Great, we'll pay private citizens to put up signs in their yards - can't outlaw freedom of speech after all. It's whack-a-mole.

margalabargala 2y ago

> If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. This would result in a better world still, without the authoritarian system you describe. No need to get it perfect the first try, just start small. For an example of this in action, drive through any of the US states that do not allow billboards.

abracadaniel 2y ago
Many complex problems can become easier if we can accept that the solutions can be malleable and designed to adapt. We just don’t really apply that to laws for the most part.
- chgs 2y ago
  I don’t know if it’s America or tech people but online discourse of legal systems from American tech people seems to treat laws as code, something to interpret as written rather than the meaning. Loopholes are celebrated as being clever and are impossible to patch. This is quite alien to most of the world.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    Although it should be said the economic success of the Americans hitherto is also quite foreign to the rest of the world; and driven mainly by their legal quirks.
    - idle_zealot 2y ago
      My understanding is that our success was largely down to the Marshal Plan. The claim that it's due to legal quirks sounds dubious.
      - roenxi 2y ago
        That seems rather focused on one policy that was big in the 50s. The Marshal Plan was great but that isn't something the modern US seems to be capable of - since around Vietnam I think was the change. It has been a good 50 years where the US just breaks stuff and leaves it broken. Modern prosperity is caused by modern policy. I've seen some reasonable theorising that income basically comes from how easy it is to do business (thinking especially of https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation). Which is linked in no small way to the cultural factors chgs pointed out - the most vibrant and high income industry in the world is also the one that sees laws impeding them as a problem that can be overcome. The attitude of doing things that create wealthy even if NIMBYs object is an attitude that leads to wealth creation. Strange but true. Not the only factor, the political strength of the opposition matters a lot too.
      - bakuninsbart 2y ago
        The book Why Nations Fail makes a pretty strong argument for the core feature of successful societies to be strong institutions with low perceived corruption. Sensible laws that are upheld equally are a part of that. The US in particular benefits from an absurd amount of resources (not least of which is land), a perfectly safe geographic position, the global language and an immigrant culture. Basically able to coattail the British after independence, the destruction of much of Eurasia during WWII cemented its position as first. And great diplomacy, including the Marshal Plan, enabled the US to create an international system with many benefits and natural synergies with its inherent strengths.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Legalities don't drive profits. If anything the US was simply lucky in thr 50s to not be war torn and rebuilding it's cities post war. The only thing special is our geography and history. It's really hard to launch an attack unless you're in Canada and Mexico. So the US smartly made treaties and agreeemtns instead of repeating the bloody history Asia and the now EU went through as they constantly battled neighbors. Only Australia has such a similar advantage and instead they had to war with nature's deadliest critters trying to kill them (they arguably lost).
  - khana 2y ago
    [dead]
- margalabargala 2y ago
  We absolutely do, and in fact doing so is the primary job of many of the higher courts in the US.
flakeoil 2y ago
But how do you define advertising. What about social media influencers? How to prevent someone from paying people to promote stuff? What if it is forbidden and then only a bad government can promote their agenda, but anyone else cannot.
- dismalpedigree 2y ago
  Make paying to promote stuff is what the author asserted. If it also results in all the social media influencers behind bars, then its a double-win.
- margalabargala 2y ago
  We don't define advertising, we describe the sorts of things we would like to see go away, enumerate some of the easiest (like billboards), and amend in the future as newer manifestations become clear. This isn't some piece of rigidly-defined software instruction that also is somehow write-once execute-forever amend-never.

jononor 2y ago

One would never reach zero. And it would be challenging both to define and police laws against advertising. But to get to a world with drastically less advertisements than today seems doable.

scarface_74 2y ago
So we want the government to decide what is advertising and propaganda? Is telling people about the wrongs of government propaganda? Is going door to door about have you made Jesus the head of your life propaganda?
- jychang 2y ago
  Yeah? The government defines what is murder, defines what is tax evasion, and defines tons of other stuff already? Some states already have laws against billboards?
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    How would you like the government deciding some cause they didn’t agree with is advertising? If you live in a conservative state, what are the chances that they say advocacy for Planned Parenthood is advertising and say that advocacy for pro-life is freedom of religion? And how would that work over the Internet? Are you going to block foreign websites? I can give you a real world example. Florida requires age verification for porn sites. Sites not based in the US including the ones owned by MindGeek just ignored it.
    - amelius 2y ago
      We can start by banning ads for products and services that cost money. > And how would that work over the Internet? Are you going to block foreign websites? We just address the big platforms. No need to be exhaustive in the first attempt.
      - JustExAWS 2y ago

cogman10 2y ago

> that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty. What? How? Advertising isn't a good or service. About the only way I could see it economically being damaging is if you subscribe to the "broken windows" theory of economics.

pessimizer 2y ago
Advertising tells me what goods and services are available, and at what prices. This is a service.
- cogman10 2y ago
  So does a search engine and 3rd party reviewers. Further, any store will be pretty highly incentivized to provide a quick list of goods or services offered and likely the prices (most already do this). I don't need the same ad repeated 20 times to know that Ford sells cars and trucks.
  - grues-dinner 2y ago
    > I don't need the same ad repeated 20 times to know that Ford sells cars and trucks. Not only that, but the Ford ad of a vehicle driving cinematically across a landscape before disgorging a laughing and implausibly photogenic family does nothing to inform you about the relative merits of the vehicle. Anything specific mentioned in the advert is as likely to be flimflam or only technical truth as not, so nothing mentioned in the advert can be taken as useful purchase-informing fact without further research.
    - cogman10 2y ago
      Exactly. There's an economic negative to advertising, particularly in the US, because "puffery" is legal. That gives advertisers nearly complete free reign to lie about stuff (especially if they put in a small white text disclaimer that says the things you are seeing and hearing aren't really true.)
- 2y ago

jongjong 2y ago

Advertising is unsolicited content which attempts to trigger or nudge a behaviour. There should be a limit on the quantity of advertising. Limited to like 100 people a day on average. We already have anti-spam laws. There would still be advertising but it would be from people from your own communities instead of big corporations.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
> Advertising is unsolicited content which attempts to trigger or nudge a behaviour. So I'm listening to the radio, and one minute I'm hearing someone on NPR (or an equivalent public broadcaster) explaining how to make my back healthier; the next minute there's someone trying to convince me that some product will make my back healthier. Which one is advertising and which one is not?
- viraptor 2y ago
  > explaining HOW TO make my back healthier > that SOME PRODUCT will make my back healthier. Is it really that tricky?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    It is. The advice from the expert includes recommendations to buy a type of product, perhaps without a brand name.
    - dwaltrip 2y ago
      Ads are inauthentic speech someone is paid to express. If entity A pays entity B to say or display their words or content, it's an ad. This is not an impossible problem. It doesn't need to be perfect, and we can iterate.
      - twoodfin 2y ago
        Or, instead of trying to decide which speech is good and which is bad, we could let anyone say anything they want, across any medium the cost of which they are willing to bear.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago

What you can do relatively easily is to control the physical format of advertising. For example, consider how rare "billboards" are outside of the USA. Or towns in various places that prohibit signage that is not in the same plane as the edge of the building (i.e. no sticky-outy signs). Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge cases that are tricky, but overall the situation doesn't seem too fraught.

cavisne 2y ago
Billboards being rare outside of the US seems quite incorrect. The developing world is full of billboards, and places in Europe like Milan have some wild Samsung billboards.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  OK, let me restate that: there are places (even a few within the USA) that have very few or no billboards, because they are banned.
  - anjel 2y ago
    Good luck getting e.g. Formula 1 to take down their sponsorship banners.
    - kristiandupont 2y ago
      You don't think F1 would follow the law?
      - LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
        Do you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Ecclestone#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Ecclestone#Controversie...

michaelhoney 2y ago

If you can’t imagine it, try a bit harder. We can build a better world, but it takes effort.

baumy 2y ago
Would you be interested in making a comment that adds to the conversation, instead of whatever this was? The person you're replying to identified constraints that prevent him from imagining it - any system for restricting advertisements will either be permissive enough that it's ineffective, or strict enough that it will be abused for political reasons. This sounds like a reasonable concern. Can you imagine a realistic way around this issue?
jjk166 2y ago
The problem is the harder you try to imagine it, the less it looks like a better world. Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy. Getting rid of a billboard for something I am never going to buy sounds great, but it kinda sucks for the person who actually is interested in the thing that billboard is advertising. Even if there were some type of advertising that provided no benefit to any part of society, the restriction on the freedom to communicate those advertisements is something that harms all of us. Sometimes the part of building a better world that takes the most effort is recognizing where we already have.
- polygamous_bat 2y ago
  > Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy I would argue that paid advertisement is a force distorting free speech. In a town square, if you can pay to have the loudest megaphone to speak over everyone else, soon everyone would either just shut up and leave or not be able to speak properly, leaving your voice the only voice in the conversation. Why should money be able to buy you that power?
  - chii 2y ago
    > Why should money be able to buy you that power? why shouldn't it? If somebody believes that their message is important enough to outbid everybody else, their message ought to be the one that is displayed.

shadowgovt 2y ago

Even if the authoritarianism to enforce it weren't by itself undesirable, banning advertising creates a situation where incumbents (known names) have a significant advantage over new entrants to a market. It's worth analyzing why a society wants that and who benefits from it.

Ray20 2y ago
>banning advertising creates a situation where incumbents (known names) have a significant advantage over new entrants to a market. The article almost explicitly states that this is precisely the goal. We all understand who those populists in 2016 are, who "bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences". So I think we are not talking about authoritarianism here, but full-fledged totalitarianism. Such a policy is a powerful lever of control, allowing government to obtain even more levers. And in the end people still vote "wrongly" (spoiler: they are voting "wrongly" not because of some Russian advertisement on facebook), but the government at that point will not care anymore how people vote because that will not affect anything.

SoftTalker 2y ago

As a fantasy it sounds nice but it immediately hits the wall of the 1st amendment.

cookingrobot 2y ago
How is that? There are lots of things that are illegal that are just “speech”. Fraud, threats, impersonation, etc etc.
wskish 2y ago
Amplified messaging from corporations is not the same as the free speech of individuals. Just as we disallow advertising for cigarettes and hard liquor on TV, a democratic society should be free to select other classes of messages that corporations are not permitted to amplify into public spaces.
- twoodfin 2y ago
  Hard liquor ads are all over (e.g.) broadcasts of NFL games. Cigarette advertising “bans” are not legislated, IIRC, but a result of the various consolidated settlements of the 1990s-era lawsuits against the tobacco companies. They’re essentially voluntary, and it’s not obvious that a genuine ban would survive constitutional scrutiny. It might: Commercial speech is among the least protected forms of speech. But at some point a line is crossed: Painting “Read the New York Times” on the side of a barn you own is bread & butter freedom of expression.
  - TomasBM 2y ago
    Outside the US (e.g., Europe), advertising bans for tobacco and liquor can work quite well. Sure, there will always be bad cases and loopholes - even bans on murder don't work 100% - but there's a reason "bans" are still a viable mechanism.
  - const_cast 2y ago
    > But at some point a line is crossed: Painting “Read the New York Times” on the side of a barn you own is bread & butter freedom of expression. Okay, then don't make that illegal. I don't understand this mentality of "everything is the same as everything else so we can't do anything". Sure, it's all just scale. But scale matters. Scale is why I can do a science experiment at home and it's cool, but I can't make a nuclear warhead. Seems for just about everything we've been able to find that line and work around it. This "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" approach to society is toxic, and we need to stop.

dietr1ch 2y ago

> 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. I've been on the advertising, is an evil parasite around useful transactions bandwagon for a while and thought this was really hard to define properly. So far my best take is around that what's good is being discoverable instead of something that you run into. This allows people to do what they want, without the evil side of unconsciously or in-competitively driving them to your business/deals.

mystified5016 2y ago

There's two kinds of advertising: your local mom and pop running a labor day sale in the local paper, and megacorps spending billions of dollars advertising soda and roblock lootcrates or whatever to kids, or plastering every square inch of public and private space with maximally attention-seeking posters and billboards. One of these is good and one is bad.

aldanor 2y ago
That's the tough part - drawing precise line. There's lots of points between megacorps and local mnps.
- Tempest1981 2y ago
  The line could be adjusted, and would need to be as people exploit loopholes. If humans can't decide, we can train a LLM to be the arbiter.

Aeolun 2y ago

I think the article mentions banning “sold advertising”, which seems like a fair way to go about it. You can still advertise your own stuff, but you cannot pay a marketplace to do it for you any more. Advertising would by necessity become a lot more local.

cyberax 2y ago
How would I advertise my app? Or my TV brand?
- Tempest1981 2y ago
  Reputable review sites are better than random advertisements
  - etempleton 2y ago
    How do those sites make money if advertising doesn’t exist? A major challenge in journalism is because of the collapse in value of banner ads. No one but the very largest newspapers have sustainable businesses in the United States and they only do because of the critical mass they have reached with subscribers.
    - polygamous_bat 2y ago
      Good information is valuable. When internet didn’t exist people paid good money for newspaper and magazines because they provided good information which people found valuable.
    - halper 2y ago
      I subscribe to a magazine that publishes tests and reviews of everything from lawn fertiliser to spices, via vacuums and mobile phones. It costs money and I trust that they are not bribed. It seems rather certain an end to advertising would mean the death of lots of low-quality "media".
  - cyberax 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

whall6 2y ago

Agree with this entirely. In fact, I would go as far as saying if advertising was illegal, then expressing opinions would be illegal. Everything is an advertisement.

GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
Reductio ad absurdum? I want to live in a world where we understand the difference between opinion and sales.
naasking 2y ago
There's a fairly clear line between opinion and advertisement. For instance, one is paid for and the other is given freely.
- whall6 2y ago
  What does it mean to be paid? Money? Goods? Services? Favors?
  - naasking 2y ago
    Income, assets and capital gains are clearly defined in the tax code.

freeamz 2y ago

I don't know about 'advertising', but Bahai don't allow campaigning when running for leadership position. I would imagine it would be some where along line of that. It encourage action speakers louder than words. With all the modern techniques (used by neurosciences) in the modern advertising is pretty all entrainment and brain washing at this point any way. So no harm in making all that illegal. I'm pretty ok with a world with no advertising, and just function by word of mouth and network of trust.

rayiner 2y ago

> And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty. Does advertising confer an economic advantage?

naasking 2y ago

> you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty. I don't see how you reached this conclusion, unless you think advertising/propaganda yields bet positive outcomes more than net negative, which seems contentious. Here's one way it could be false: the wisdom of the crowds only really works when groups of people independently reach their own conclusions, because people who don't understand an issue are randomly distributed around the correct answer and so they all cancel each other out, leaving only the people who do understand an issue to cluster around the correct decision. Propaganda/advertising works directly against this, thus undercutting the usefulness of the wisdom of crowds.

GuinansEyebrows 2y ago

Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good. I spent 5+ years living in Hawaii, where just billboards are illegal. I can’t quantify the effect but qualitatively, it’s something I dearly miss in the concrete hell of Southern California.

the_cat_kittles 2y ago

hey why try to do anything ever, people will just find a way around it and it will be worse than if we did nothing. lets make murder legal, fewer people will get killed i guess

patcon 2y ago

We cant define the beginning and end of human life/consciousness, and we've regulated it for thousands of years. That it is hard to define does not make it impossible to control

guerrilla 2y ago

This is just the nirvana fallacy. We need to do our best.

nazgul17 2y ago

Perhaps just banning algorithmic advertising would be enough?

beefnugs 2y ago

There is no reason it has to be so immoral, annoying, and evil. There could be a whole gamified system where people who choose to voluntarily participate can find things they want to buy from people eager to sell

camgunz 2y ago

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 on me, yadda yadda. It's so transparent to me now, and I've passed this curse onto you. Nothing else in law works this way. No definition is ironclad. This is what legislators, agencies, and courts are for. We all know this.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pembrook 2y ago
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 decentralized market regulation of that scarcity. Instead of something that attempts to land on fairness (even if imperfect), no market at all guarantees unfairness. Advertising puts a price on the scarce commodity of attention in broad strokes, and it not always, but generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising). I know, please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes. Like all markets, we should regulate advertising to ensure it doesn’t get out of control. But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society. Hence why this is a non-serious, silly idea.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  What is a "natural market"? Please explain with examples from nature. Your argument begs the question. Attention is indeed scarce, but that's because ad tech has created an attention economy. Assuming that advertising is the best use of human attention is - how can I put this politely? - really quite eccentric.

rglullis 2y ago

> How do you even define advertising? You don't define "advertising". You look for things that advertisers do and see if they can be made illegal or unprofitable. Formula 1 cars used to have displays for tobacco products. At one point, the law in Europe started saying "you can not do that", so tobacco advertisements disappeared.

fmbb 2y ago

> you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What is your evidence that there is any economic advantage at all to have unregulated advertising? I'm fairly sure advertising is regulated in all sovereign states. And I am also quite certain that the jurisdictions in which gambling advertisement is illegal fare better economically than those in which it is illegal. It only makes sense: gambling is not productive, the less of it you have the better your population spend their money on productive things, the more advertising you have the more people spend on gambling (otherwise what is the point of advertising?), if you forbid gamling advertising there will be less gambling advertising (if not, what is your complaint even?). Nothing about this statement of yours makes sense.

caseyy 2y ago

> How do you even define advertising? Almost everyone can tell when they’re being advertised to. And almost everyone can tell when they advertise. Effectiveness of such bans would depend on enforcement, the definition is clear enough.

halgir 2y ago
> the definition is clear enough. It really isn't though. There's so many different forms that we can't reduce it to "I know it when I see it" territory and depend on case-by-case enforcement. Do we ban outdoor billboards? Product placement? Content marketing? Public relations? Sponsor logos on sports uniforms? Brand logos on retail clothing? Mailing lists? I do love the idea, but doubt its feasibility. Implementation would have to be meticulous, and I expect the advertising industry would always be one step ahead in an endless race of interpretation. We can still try to curtail the most disruptive forms though, we don't have to destroy all advertising at once to make a positive difference.
- caseyy 2y ago
  I'd say don't let the perfect be the enemy of good. Banning 80% of existing advertisement practices would practically achieve all the goals bans strive for.
- shruggedatlas 2y ago
  Outdoor billboards, product placement, sponsor logos on sports uniforms - yes Content marketing, public relations, mailing lists - no "we don't have to destroy all advertising at once to make a positive difference"

LightBug1 2y ago

No public facing advertising. At all. No sponsored advertising. At all. If advertising "skirts through the loopholes", fine - at least we'll recognise it as underground (like darknet now). The liberal version, I don't even understand how you got there so won't comment. That was wild. And you seem to ignore the issue the OP mentions about not being able to unilaterally disarm. It's easy if you try. But you won't try ... what a shame.

singpolyma3 2y ago
Ban farmer's markets
- dismalpedigree 2y ago
  How do farmer’s markets run afoul of this proposal? Perhaps there is advertising by the market to tell people to come, that can be eliminated. Once you are at the market there are only individual booths advertising their wares, which is fine because its not a 3rd party.

ajuc 2y ago

There was almost no advertising in my country when I was 7. I live in Poland and till 1989 it was communist puppet state of USSR (not through our choice, obviously, so the moment we could - we noped out of it). There was no point advertising because there was no competition, all the companies were nationalized and no matter how well or badly they did - their employees earned the same. If you persuaded people to buy your washing powder instead of the other available washing powder - that just means the queues for your washing powder will be longer. There was A LOT of communist and anti western propaganda tho. But no advertising is perfectly possible.

simne 2y ago
I live in Ukraine, and we still suffer from soviet limitations on advertisement and entrepreneurs. Every time when govt and parliament need to make some urgent reform, nobody could predict, what will really happen - as they could just raise taxes, or deform some industry with some unreal regulations, and only in few cases implement some adequate, for example synchronize with EU regulations. For example, for banks appear problem, people avoid to pay credits, so need some enforcement - powers approved confiscation of property to pay credit, but with exceptions of unprotected people, so bank cannot confiscate from pensioners, when child registered in property, and few others, so literally huge percent of citizens now protected from banks, and this new law is step back, not progress.

kmacdough 2y ago

> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? Seems you're insistent on letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is precisely why judges exist. It would not be difficult to define Ads well enough to cover 99% of current advertising. Sure there will be gray areas. Advertisers will adapt. But it would make it profoundly more expensive, difficult and risky. I'm not sure I understand a concrete economic argument other than "anything which makes it harder for businesses to be wildly profitable off minimal value hurts the economy". But that only really holds of you define the economy by things like GDP, which really just capture how wildly profitable companies are and have almost no bearing on quality of life for the people; in other words, the argument is circular.

singpolyma3 2y ago
A sign on the front of a store is advertising. If we ban these how will you even know what stores there are downtown?
- dismalpedigree 2y ago
  The author specifically mentioned paid 3rd party. So an individual/business can “advertise” all they want for their services, but paying other entities to “speak” for them is not allowed. Yes, i can find all kinds of loopholes too. Thats what judges are for.
  - Nemi 2y ago
    I’ll play. Assume paying for others to advertise for you is illegal. What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right? What about them wearing a sign so they don’t have to shout? Driving with a sign on a car? Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that. How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line? I am not an advertising apologist. I hate ads with the power of a thousand suns. I use an ad blocker. But this idea of making advertising illegal is just a non-starter. It goes against the basic tenants of freedom of speech.

dukeyukey 2y ago

Eh, even if you exclude any potential side effects like that I don't see it being workable. I believe advertising as done today is _mostly_ a zero sum game, but without any advertising at all, it's going to be _really_ hard to find out about stuff!

grandempire 2y ago

I don’t think that’s the issue. Whatever advertising is, it’s clearly been industrialized by technology in ways that a) did not exist 100 years ago b) can be limited in effectiveness by removing that technology

kerkeslager 2y ago

> 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. This is just the perfect solution fallacy. Nobody in this conversation thinks there's a set of laws that would work perfectly to prevent all advertising. That doesn't mean it can't be a hell of a lot better than it is. Playing whack-a-mole with loopholes and making careful regulations to avoid inhibiting human rights is still a huge improvement over letting corporations trample human rights at will.

lambda 2y ago

In Vermont, we have banned outdoor advertising (billboards) for over 50 years with no such issues. It's hilarious that you think that advertising is actually necessary for economic prosperity. If anything, it's probably a net drain on it.

swayvil 2y ago

Advertising is a nuance of action in the informational world the way combat is a nuance of action in the physical world. We can draw the line between an aggressive blow and a firm handshake. We can distinguish that. We will figure out how to distinguish manipulatory mindfucking from regular conversation too.

Super_Jambo 2y ago

For the same reason weights and measures legislation is of course impossible. This is why every time you go to the shops you have to carry your own standard weights and balance scale! The idea that society could regulate the weight and volume of every product in every shop is simply preposterous!

tshaddox 2y ago

It’s impossible to live in a world without murder, and murder is difficult to precisely define and identify, and yet neither of those are good reasons to oppose making murder illegal.

coldtea 2y ago

>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? No ads in TV programming. No product placement in movies. No billboards. No subway or bus station advertising posters. No paid recommending of specific products. No promotional material for products - nothing with fictional elements. No web ads. No sponsored links. No social media ads. No paid reviews. (you could still do some of those covertly, with "under the table" money, but then if you caught you get fined or go to jail) No tracking consuming preferences of any kind, not even if you have an online store. Just a database of past purchases on your own store - and using them for profiling via ML should be illegal too. If people want to find out about a product, they can see it on your company's website (seeking it directly), or get a leaflet from you. In either case no dramatized / finctional / aspirational images or video should be shown. >And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty. You're removing cancer.

jagraff 2y ago
Are products allowed to have labels? Am I allowed to tell my friends I like a product? What if I put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it?
- 542354234235 2y ago
  Is the company paying you to do any of those things?
- coldtea 2y ago
  >Are products allowed to have labels? Last time I checked, a product label (on the product or on the package) is not an advertisement. It's just the name of the product and/or brand, and maybe some lines about what it does. Even if you call a product label "a sort of an advertisment" it's fine. When people complain about advertising today, do they refer to product labels? Or to their friends telling them about a product? If not, why are you bringing this up? >Am I allowed to tell my friends I like a product? What if I put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it? Sure, as long as you aren't getting paid for doing it (directly or via affiliate kickbacks). If you are, and you're discovered, you pay a fine - or go to jail. You try to paint a "it's impossible" all or nothing scenario around marginal advertising and edge cases. Doesn't matter. If we can get rid of 90% of overt advertising - tv ads, streaming ads, posters, billboads, radio jingles, that's enough, even if "you put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it".

const_cast 2y ago

This is a classic case of perfect being the enemy of good. We don't need to 1984 listen to every conversation for any hints at product endorsement. We can start with obvious things - for example, prohibiting a company from spending money on marketing. Banning ads on the air, whatever. There's levels to this. There's really evil slot machine marketing. You know, try to get people addicted to your social media and use that addiction as a way to generate profit. And then there's not so bad marketing. Like my friend telling me he likes his new pair of pants.

brookst 2y ago
I think you’d do better banning the sale of advertising than the purchase. Demand-side is a mess and hard to draw the line. It’s not a perfect / good thing, it’s a feasibility thing.
programjames 2y ago
Well, I think the point is your friend can still tell you he likes his new pair of pants, he just can't be a paid actor.

cwmoore 2y ago

“GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom“

Sloowms 2y ago

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

tpm 2y ago

> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. It's quite easy though. Just remove incentives to advertise. Remote the possibility of profit. Will it destroy the economy? Of course, but the advertising will cease. I grew up in a communist country. There was some advertising (in TV, radio, magazines; very little outdoor), but since all the profits went to the state anyway, there was no real competition, and also often shortages, the advertising was not really serious. It didn't influence people a lot. It was harmless. Of course there was a lot of communist propaganda in the media, in the schools and workplaces, outdoor banners etc., and that is advertising too. But also this was already at the stage when nobody took it seriously anymore.

rightbyte 2y ago

>> imagine a world without advertising > I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable. What? I have world peace on my devices right now with the help of Ublock Origin. If my county bans billboards, as the county next to me have, I will see no ads except for on paper I choose to.

renox 2y ago

>> 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? Yet, in some countries advertising for tobacco or alcohol is banned, if it's possible to ban these advertising for these product why would it be impossible to ban every advertising. > And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty. Uh? You can advertise in these other nation but they also won't be able to advertise in your country, so I don't understand your point.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?" "How do you define it?" is an oft-repeated and weak argument against regulation used by online commenters who likely are defending a self-interest in maintaining tha status quo behaviour of so-called "tech" companies. Online advertising services are obviously capable of being defined as these are bought by advertisers and sold by so-called "tech" companies every day. These so-called "tech" companies define "products" and "services", offered for "free", all the time. The commercial purpose is facilitation of online advertising. This can be regulated. Before the internet was opened to the public, commercial use was prohibited. Today, HN commenters would no doubt try to suggest that defining what is and is not "commercial use" would be "impossible". But it's too late. It was already done. The uncomfortable truth for so-called "tech" companies is that _any_ regulation that affects the ability to collect data, conduct surveillance and assist the injection of advertising into people's "user experience" could have a significant impact on their "business model". Hence they try to argue _any_ regulation is unworkable. All-or-nothing. Perfect, 100% solution or nothing at all. But regulation does not have to define _all_ advertising. It may only define advertising that meets certain criteria. All-or-nothing thinking is nonsensical in this context. By analogy, when so-called "tech" companies propose alleged "solutions" for privacy issues, do they propose one solution that offers total, complete "privacy". How do we even define "privacy". What they propose is usually some incremental improvement. It is possible to limit online advertising through rules and regulations. Of course this is a unacceptable proposition for so-called "tech" companies. Their only viable "business model" depends on usurping the bandwidth of internet subscribers for surreptitious, unwanted data collection, real-time surveillance and online advertising.

casualrandomcom 2y ago

>> imagine a world without advertising > I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable. I don't know, in my country advertising tobacco products is forbidden since at least 20 years, how did they pull this magic trick?? go figure

poulsbohemian 2y ago

>How do you even define advertising? You nailed it man. My first response even to the headline let alone the article was to reflect on the first line spoken by my professor in my first marketing class: "Marketing is about educating the consumer." Advertising is just one way we attempt to do that, and taken to an extreme, I have no idea how you could ever make it stop. The article is clearly focused on one part of advertising, but even then, someone will always build a better mousetrap.

cactacea 2y ago
Vermont seems to have figured this out with billboards. So clearly it is not as impossible as you are making it out to be.
- poulsbohemian 2y ago
  You are completely missing (or perhaps reinforcing my point) - billboards? Great, we'll create a fleet of vehicles with mobile advertising on the back. Outlaw that? Great, we'll pay private citizens to put up signs in their yards - can't outlaw freedom of speech after all. It's whack-a-mole.