3 ms·

> it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away It would? I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to craft or

> it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away It would? I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to craft or enforce (probably not constitutional in the US). The very nature of advertising is it's meant to be seen by as many people as possible. That makes enforcement fairly easy. We already have laws on the books where paid advertising/sponsorship must be clear to the viewer. That's why google search results and others are peppered with "this is an ad". > To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?" Except drugs/alcohol can be consumed in secret and are highly sought after. The dynamic is completely different. Nobody really wants to see ads and there's enough "that's illegal" people that'd really nerf the ability of ads to get away with it. There's not going to be ad speakeasies.

34679 2y ago
I thought drug laws were a fine example, but let's look at another. It's illegal to bribe politicians. Does that mean there is no grift in Washington?
- cogman10 2y ago
  That has less to do with it being hard to craft bribery laws and more to do with the fact that the current bribery laws are entirely ineffectual. It's absolutely something that could be fixed, but certainly not something almost any politician would want to fix. I will grant that companies would lobby hard against an anti-advertising bill (which means it'll likely never pass). That doesn't mean you couldn't make one that's pretty effective. But, again, the nature of advertising makes it quite easy to outlaw. Unlike bribery, where a congress person can shove gold bars into their suit jackets in secret, advertising has to be seen by a lot of people to be effective. Making it something that has to be done in secret will immediately make it harder to do. The best you'll likely see is preferential placement of goods in stores or maybe some branding in a TV show.
  - kragen 2y ago
    There has probably never been a human society in history or prehistory without bribery, and no possible set of bribery laws could conceivably create one. This is a property of human nature, not the current set of laws in one country. I think the same is probably almost true of advertising, though maybe societies without money such as Tawantinsuyu are an exception. But I don't think you can have merchants without advertising, because, like fraud, advertising is so profitable for merchants that they will do some of it despite whatever laws you have.
    - cogman10 2y ago
      I agree. I also think this is a false dilemma. Just because some corruption always will exist, doesn't mean that there aren't societies which have enforced laws that are more or less effective. This binary thinking doesn't need to happen in a policy discussion. We don't need a perfect set of laws or rules to make things better. We don't avoid having a law just because someone will violate it. For example, a speed limit is still valid to have even though most people will break it, some egregiously so. DUIs laws are useful even though people still drink and drive. It just so happens that with advertising we can be particularly effective at curbing the worst offenders. That's because advertising is most effective when it's seen by the largest number of people. I don't really care if a company tries to skirt an anti-ad law by paying an influencer millions to wear their product, so long I'm not forced to watch 20 minutes of ads in a 20 minute video. An anti-ad law would force advertisers to be subversive which is, frankly, fine by me. Subversive ads simply can't be intrusive.
- cassianoleal 2y ago
  You argument sounds a bit like "crime exists despite laws against them also existing, therefore we should not have such laws". What you seem to be missing is that, in the end, it's all about risks vs. potential gains. As it stands, advertising is relatively cheap and the only risk is to lose all the money spent on it. Once it's made illegal, that formula changes massively since now there's a much bigger risk in the form of whatever the law determines - fines, perhaps losing a professional license or the right to work on a certain field, or to found and/or direct a company, perhaps even jail time! You're right, it will probably still exist in some ways in some contexts. I bet it wouldn't be nearly as pervasive as it is today though, and that's a win. And if it's not enough, up the stakes.
  - kragen 2y ago
    I wasn't saying we shouldn't have such laws. I was saying that we should consider the possible enactment of such laws in the light of the knowledge that people will try to circumvent them and will sometimes succeed, rather than assuming that, if advertising is prohibited, there will be no advertising. You seem to agree with this, which means you disagree with the original article, which does make that assumption. Separately, I was saying that we can't usefully debate the pros and cons of such a vague proposal. You can postulate that some sort of vaguely defined prohibition would have no drawbacks, but any concrete policy proposal will in fact have drawbacks, and in some cases those will outweigh their advantages.
    - cassianoleal 2y ago
      Ok, in this case we do seem to be in broad agreement. I'm unclear of the value of your ideas though. > I was saying that we should consider the possible enactment of such laws in the light of the knowledge that people will try to circumvent them and will sometimes succeed That should always be the case when discussing any laws. If you don't consider that people will try to circumvent them, there is no point in considering punishment for when they do, and ultimately there is no point to the law. > rather than assuming that, if advertising is prohibited, there will be no advertising. As above, I would expect no one to make such assumptions. > Separately, I was saying that we can't usefully debate the pros and cons of such a vague proposal. I don't see why not. I suspect most proposals and ideas start vague, and by discussing their pros and cons and further refining them, we get to more concrete, more actionable ones. > but any concrete policy proposal will in fact have drawbacks, and in some cases those will outweigh their advantages. This is a truism, I'm not sure what value it adds to the discussion.
- xigoi 2y ago
  Murder is illegal, but still happens. Therefore, by your logic, we should legalize murder.
  - kragen 2y ago
    No, but when discussing laws against murder, we should not assume that they would eliminate murder. This article does assume that laws against advertising would eliminate advertising.
kragen 2y ago
Well, I agree that for the most part consumers try to minimize their exposure to advertising, but not always. Some extreme examples of commercial advertising that was or is highly sought after by its target audience include eBay listings, Craigslist posts, the Yellow Pages, classified ads, the Sears catalog, job offer postings, the McMaster–Carr catalog, Computer Shopper before the internet was widely accessible, and "product reviews" by reviewers who got the product for free. So it seems likely that there would, in fact, be "ad speakeasies". But let's consider the other side of this: > I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to [...] enforce Suppose we consider the narrowest sort of thing we'd get the most benefit out of prohibiting, like memecoin pump-and-dump scams, which are wildly profitable for the promoters but provide no benefit at all to the buyers, so nobody goes looking for. We can get a preview of what that prohibition would look like by looking at the current state of affairs, because those are already illegal. And what we see are fake Elon Musk live streams with deepfaked mouth movements, fake Elon Musk Twitter accounts that reply to his followers, prominent influencers like Javier Milei for no apparent reason touting memecoins they claim to have no stake in themselves, prominent influencers like Donald Trump touting memecoins they openly have stakes in, etc. I haven't heard about any memecoins making ostensibly unpaid product placement appearances in novels or Hollywood movies (probably crime thrillers) but it wouldn't surprise me. How about sports stars? Today it's assumed that if a sportsball player is wearing a corporate logo, it's because the company is paying him to wear it. Suppose this were prohibited; players would have to remove or cover up the Nike logos on their shoes. Probably fans would still want to know which brand of shoes they were wearing, wouldn't they? Sports journalists would publish investigative journalism showing that one or another player wore Nike Airs, drank Gatorade, or used Titleist golf balls, and the fans would lap it up. How could you prove Titleist didn't give the players any consideration in return? A lot of YouTubers now accept donations of arbitrary size from pseudonymous donors, often via Patreon. In this brave new world they would obviously be prohibited from listing the donors' pseudonyms, but what if Apple were to pseudonymously donate large amounts to YouTubers who reviewed Apple products favorably? The donees wouldn't know their income stream depended on Apple, but viewers would still prefer to watch the better-funded channels who used better cameras, paid professional video editors, used more informative test equipment, and had professional audio dubs into their native language. Which would, apparently quite organically, be the ones that most strongly favored Apple. Would you prohibit pseudonymous donations to influencers? Commercial advertising is in fact prohibited at Burning Man, which is more or less viable because commerce is prohibited there. You have to cover up the logos on your rental trucks, though nobody is imprisoned or fined for violating this, and it isn't enforced to the extent of concealing hood ornaments and sneaker logos. But one year there was a huge advertising scandal, where one of the biggest art projects that year, Uchronia ("the Belgian Waffle") was revealed after the fact to be a promotional construction for a Belgian company that builds such structures commercially. (I'm sure there have been many such controversies more recently, but I haven't been able to attend for several years, so I don't know about them.) Let's consider a negative-space case as well: Yelp notoriously removed negative reviews from businesses' listings if they signed up for its service. We can imagine arbitrarily subtle ways of achieving such effects, such as YouTube suggesting less often that users watch a certain video if it criticizes Google or a YouTube supporter (such as the US government) or if it speaks favorably of a competing service. How do you prohibit that kind of advertising in an enforceable way? Do you prohibit Yelp from removing reviews from the site? Hopefully this clarifies some of the potential difficulties with enforcing a ban on advertising, even to people who don't want to be advertised to.

34679 2y ago

I thought drug laws were a fine example, but let's look at another. It's illegal to bribe politicians. Does that mean there is no grift in Washington?

cogman10 2y ago
That has less to do with it being hard to craft bribery laws and more to do with the fact that the current bribery laws are entirely ineffectual. It's absolutely something that could be fixed, but certainly not something almost any politician would want to fix. I will grant that companies would lobby hard against an anti-advertising bill (which means it'll likely never pass). That doesn't mean you couldn't make one that's pretty effective. But, again, the nature of advertising makes it quite easy to outlaw. Unlike bribery, where a congress person can shove gold bars into their suit jackets in secret, advertising has to be seen by a lot of people to be effective. Making it something that has to be done in secret will immediately make it harder to do. The best you'll likely see is preferential placement of goods in stores or maybe some branding in a TV show.
- kragen 2y ago
  There has probably never been a human society in history or prehistory without bribery, and no possible set of bribery laws could conceivably create one. This is a property of human nature, not the current set of laws in one country. I think the same is probably almost true of advertising, though maybe societies without money such as Tawantinsuyu are an exception. But I don't think you can have merchants without advertising, because, like fraud, advertising is so profitable for merchants that they will do some of it despite whatever laws you have.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    I agree. I also think this is a false dilemma. Just because some corruption always will exist, doesn't mean that there aren't societies which have enforced laws that are more or less effective. This binary thinking doesn't need to happen in a policy discussion. We don't need a perfect set of laws or rules to make things better. We don't avoid having a law just because someone will violate it. For example, a speed limit is still valid to have even though most people will break it, some egregiously so. DUIs laws are useful even though people still drink and drive. It just so happens that with advertising we can be particularly effective at curbing the worst offenders. That's because advertising is most effective when it's seen by the largest number of people. I don't really care if a company tries to skirt an anti-ad law by paying an influencer millions to wear their product, so long I'm not forced to watch 20 minutes of ads in a 20 minute video. An anti-ad law would force advertisers to be subversive which is, frankly, fine by me. Subversive ads simply can't be intrusive.
cassianoleal 2y ago
You argument sounds a bit like "crime exists despite laws against them also existing, therefore we should not have such laws". What you seem to be missing is that, in the end, it's all about risks vs. potential gains. As it stands, advertising is relatively cheap and the only risk is to lose all the money spent on it. Once it's made illegal, that formula changes massively since now there's a much bigger risk in the form of whatever the law determines - fines, perhaps losing a professional license or the right to work on a certain field, or to found and/or direct a company, perhaps even jail time! You're right, it will probably still exist in some ways in some contexts. I bet it wouldn't be nearly as pervasive as it is today though, and that's a win. And if it's not enough, up the stakes.
- kragen 2y ago
  I wasn't saying we shouldn't have such laws. I was saying that we should consider the possible enactment of such laws in the light of the knowledge that people will try to circumvent them and will sometimes succeed, rather than assuming that, if advertising is prohibited, there will be no advertising. You seem to agree with this, which means you disagree with the original article, which does make that assumption. Separately, I was saying that we can't usefully debate the pros and cons of such a vague proposal. You can postulate that some sort of vaguely defined prohibition would have no drawbacks, but any concrete policy proposal will in fact have drawbacks, and in some cases those will outweigh their advantages.
  - cassianoleal 2y ago
    Ok, in this case we do seem to be in broad agreement. I'm unclear of the value of your ideas though. > I was saying that we should consider the possible enactment of such laws in the light of the knowledge that people will try to circumvent them and will sometimes succeed That should always be the case when discussing any laws. If you don't consider that people will try to circumvent them, there is no point in considering punishment for when they do, and ultimately there is no point to the law. > rather than assuming that, if advertising is prohibited, there will be no advertising. As above, I would expect no one to make such assumptions. > Separately, I was saying that we can't usefully debate the pros and cons of such a vague proposal. I don't see why not. I suspect most proposals and ideas start vague, and by discussing their pros and cons and further refining them, we get to more concrete, more actionable ones. > but any concrete policy proposal will in fact have drawbacks, and in some cases those will outweigh their advantages. This is a truism, I'm not sure what value it adds to the discussion.
xigoi 2y ago
Murder is illegal, but still happens. Therefore, by your logic, we should legalize murder.
- kragen 2y ago
  No, but when discussing laws against murder, we should not assume that they would eliminate murder. This article does assume that laws against advertising would eliminate advertising.

kragen 2y ago

Well, I agree that for the most part consumers try to minimize their exposure to advertising, but not always. Some extreme examples of commercial advertising that was or is highly sought after by its target audience include eBay listings, Craigslist posts, the Yellow Pages, classified ads, the Sears catalog, job offer postings, the McMaster–Carr catalog, Computer Shopper before the internet was widely accessible, and "product reviews" by reviewers who got the product for free. So it seems likely that there would, in fact, be "ad speakeasies". But let's consider the other side of this: > I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to [...] enforce Suppose we consider the narrowest sort of thing we'd get the most benefit out of prohibiting, like memecoin pump-and-dump scams, which are wildly profitable for the promoters but provide no benefit at all to the buyers, so nobody goes looking for. We can get a preview of what that prohibition would look like by looking at the current state of affairs, because those are already illegal. And what we see are fake Elon Musk live streams with deepfaked mouth movements, fake Elon Musk Twitter accounts that reply to his followers, prominent influencers like Javier Milei for no apparent reason touting memecoins they claim to have no stake in themselves, prominent influencers like Donald Trump touting memecoins they openly have stakes in, etc. I haven't heard about any memecoins making ostensibly unpaid product placement appearances in novels or Hollywood movies (probably crime thrillers) but it wouldn't surprise me. How about sports stars? Today it's assumed that if a sportsball player is wearing a corporate logo, it's because the company is paying him to wear it. Suppose this were prohibited; players would have to remove or cover up the Nike logos on their shoes. Probably fans would still want to know which brand of shoes they were wearing, wouldn't they? Sports journalists would publish investigative journalism showing that one or another player wore Nike Airs, drank Gatorade, or used Titleist golf balls, and the fans would lap it up. How could you prove Titleist didn't give the players any consideration in return? A lot of YouTubers now accept donations of arbitrary size from pseudonymous donors, often via Patreon. In this brave new world they would obviously be prohibited from listing the donors' pseudonyms, but what if Apple were to pseudonymously donate large amounts to YouTubers who reviewed Apple products favorably? The donees wouldn't know their income stream depended on Apple, but viewers would still prefer to watch the better-funded channels who used better cameras, paid professional video editors, used more informative test equipment, and had professional audio dubs into their native language. Which would, apparently quite organically, be the ones that most strongly favored Apple. Would you prohibit pseudonymous donations to influencers? Commercial advertising is in fact prohibited at Burning Man, which is more or less viable because commerce is prohibited there. You have to cover up the logos on your rental trucks, though nobody is imprisoned or fined for violating this, and it isn't enforced to the extent of concealing hood ornaments and sneaker logos. But one year there was a huge advertising scandal, where one of the biggest art projects that year, Uchronia ("the Belgian Waffle") was revealed after the fact to be a promotional construction for a Belgian company that builds such structures commercially. (I'm sure there have been many such controversies more recently, but I haven't been able to attend for several years, so I don't know about them.) Let's consider a negative-space case as well: Yelp notoriously removed negative reviews from businesses' listings if they signed up for its service. We can imagine arbitrarily subtle ways of achieving such effects, such as YouTube suggesting less often that users watch a certain video if it criticizes Google or a YouTube supporter (such as the US government) or if it speaks favorably of a competing service. How do you prohibit that kind of advertising in an enforceable way? Do you prohibit Yelp from removing reviews from the site? Hopefully this clarifies some of the potential difficulties with enforcing a ban on advertising, even to people who don't want to be advertised to.