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How will you ban that without infringing on free speech. That is a thing in the US and a lot of countries outside the EU.
by thesmtsolver2 8mo ago
How will you ban that without infringing on free speech. That is a thing in the US and a lot of countries outside the EU.
- admadguy 8mo agoOutside of US free speech isn't the carte blanche it is stateside. There are guardrails, there are limitations pretty much everywhere else. Even in the US This militant application is fairly recent, post 1980s.
- Funes- 8mo ago"Commercial speech" being protected by free speech laws anywhere is abhorrent. The advertising industry, in and of itself, seems abhorrent to me. It's one of the worst things humans have come up with, ever.
- nickff 8mo agoCould one not categorize material published in a book, magazine, or on television as 'commercial speech', liable to restrictive licensing and censorship? This seems like a slippery slope which the USA is on the correct side of.
- coldtea 8mo agoCommercial speech is not the same as advertising. The product is the same as the speech, whereas in advertising the speech is in sycophantic service of another product.
- nickff 8mo agoI agree that commercial speech is not the same as advertising, but the comment I replied to was talking about restricting commercial speech, not advertising.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo agoI'm kind of curious how people think a new business should make its existence known to prospective customers.
- mrob 8mo agoSearchable catalogues of products with prices and features listed.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo agoThat assumes the customer is aware that the product exists.
- mrob 8mo agoIt only assumes they are aware that the category of products exists, and ordinary word-of-mouth communication is sufficient to propagate that knowledge.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo agoHow does word-of-mouth communication propagate knowledge that is currently in the possession of zero existing customers? Or operate for products that people have little reason to discuss with other people? Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
- mrob 8mo agoPeople don't need to discuss specific products, they only need to be aware of the existence of product categories. If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands. The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs. When people learn that their neighbors are paying less they will be naturally incentivized to investigate why. Equivalent problems can be solved with the same general technique.
- BurningFrog 8mo agoYou make your feelings clear, but don't give any arguments for it. That won't convince anyone.
- phyzix5761 8mo ago99.9% of businesses in the US are considered small businesses. If we look at all the businesses in the world small businesses make up an even larger percentage. In most parts of the world these are people with 0-5 employees; meaning they're just families and individuals trying to make ends meet. If you remove the ability for these people to advertise there goes their livelihood. I understand the desire to want to punish big evil corporations but all this will do is strengthen them because they're the ones who have enough capital to survive something like this and scoop up the marketshare left behind by the millions of small businesses that will fail when this is implemented.
- NeutralCrane 8mo ago99.9% of small businesses do little to no advertising. I can’t recall seeing an ad for a single one of the small businesses I am a customer of. 99.9% of ads I get are for megacorporations and national brands.
- phyzix5761 8mo agoI know people who do moderation for the advertising side of social platforms and they say that more than half of the advertising submissions are done by small businesses. They said that the estimate is around 90% of small businesses use internet advertising in some capacity. There's a bidding mechanism, though, so more big business ads may be shown; especially if you live in a populated region. But that's just a numbers game.
- WinstonSmith84 8mo agoI'm not following the relationship - because you'd have to pay, thus it's not "free" speech? It's hard to argue that having to pay a minimal fee (of let's say $1 per month) would be something against free speech. But the payment shall remain anonymous obviously.
- layer8 8mo agoIt would be worth a try to outlaw compensation for advertising. The spirit of free speech is usually that you aren’t being paid for it.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo agoSuppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising? The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market power over the distribution channel so that you're paying them a premium over competing distributors. But then wouldn't the best way to prevent them from extracting that premium to be to make it so nobody has exclusive control over distribution channels, e.g. by breaking up concentrated markets or requiring federated protocols?
- layer8 8mo agoThere are legal definitions of advertising, I’m sure the courts will be able to figure it out.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo agoThe "legal definition of advertising" is the thing you have to write into the law you want to enact. If you can't answer the question as the proponent of the proposal then how is a judge expected to do it?
- coldtea 8mo agoWhat the parent is getting at is it's not a mystery, such definitions already exist in all kinds of jurisdictions. In any case it's trivial to come up with such a definition that covers most cases. Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. Laws can be supplemented and ammended. We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
- Xelbair 8mo agoTrue, you can't separate ads vs sponsored content quite easily. but you can help this by banning all forms of active tracking. Static ads only, no click tracking, and complete ban on profiling clients and especially on adjusting prices based on client/possible client behavior patterns.
- MBCook 8mo agoMagazines made it work for decades. Websites can too. If you know the kind of articles your readers like, you can find ads that your readers will like.
- andwur 8mo agoIt's amusing that after all this time and (hundreds of?) billions of dollars invested in adtech I still find the adverts in old magazines far more relevant and compelling than any of the "personalised" adverts of today. The industry as a whole has missed the forest for the trees by over-fitting their systems; I might be interested in the broader category, or a tangentially related one, but at no point do I want to see the exact same product I was looking at a day ago on every ad. I didn't buy it then for a reason, so I'm not buying it now. Pervasive surveillance to make a system that's practically worse than the alternative that doesn't require mass surveillance, and is much simpler and cheaper. Did I say amusing before? Depressing is probably a better fit.
- Barrin92 8mo ago>How will you ban that without infringing on free speech You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity.
- TMWNN 8mo ago>Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. The FCC regulates airwaves (and thus broadcast stations/networks), because the broadcast spectrum is a shared resource with bandwidth limits. The FCC similarly regulates cable television systems. The FCC does not regulate cable-only television networks.
- BrenBarn 8mo agoI'd say the first amendment is due for an overhaul anyway for a variety of reasons. (Heck, the whole constitution is.)
- whackernews 8mo agoWhich parts specifically?
- BrenBarn 8mo agoObvious examples of negative consequences of the first amendment include the profusion of false and misleading advertising, the scourge of political campaign spending, and the disastrous firehouse of misinformation being pushed out in various online forums. The idea that an abstract carte blanche for free speech outweighs those real and present ills is misguided. At the same time, we see that the limitation to only protection from government action enables effective quelling of speech by private actors. At the core of the first amendment is the idea that people should not be punished for criticizing their government. I think that idea is worth preserving. But the idea that people are free to say anything they choose, in any context, regardless of its factual status, and also that their permission to do so is limited only by the resources they can muster to promulgate their speech, is an unwarranted extension of that concept.
- bigstrat2003 8mo agoI think you would find that the cure is far, far worse than the disease. We speak of rights, and those are important, but there's also a very important practical reason why we have freedom of speech: because you cannot trust that future government officials will stick to banning speech that is justly banned. Once you open that door, sooner or later someone is going to start abusing the power. How would you like it if the Trump administration was able to (with complete legality) declare that claims Biden fairly won the 2020 election are "misinformation", and punish people who make those claims? Or if you're a Trump guy, how would you like it if the next Democrat administration declared it to be "misinformation" to claim that Trump fairly won the same election, and punish people for it? The cold hard reality is that no matter how much you trust the people in the government today, eventually they will be replaced by people you consider to be the scum of the earth. And when that day comes, you will curse the day you allowed the government to punish speech, because you'll see speech you consider perfectly justified become illegal.
- whackernews 8mo agoWhat are you on about? Who’s speech? The speech of a massive multinational corporation? No thanks. I want the freedom to browse without getting pointless products shoved down my throat.
- mrob 8mo agoYou don't need to ban advertising, you just need to ban paying for advertising. That doesn't harm free speech. When there's no money to be made the problem will sort itself out.
- initramfs2 8mo agoThat's gonna probably just create a bunch of loopholes or hacks like paying with favors instead of cash
- mrob 8mo agoLoopholes can be addressed on a case-by-case basis. A solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem completely unaddressed.
- MBCook 8mo agoThis by the way is my understanding of why the EU writes laws the way they do. If they just banned infinite scrolling someone would come up with something equivalent that works slightly differently. Now they need a whole new law. It’s just constant whack-a-mole. So instead they seem to ban goals. Your thing accomplishes that goal? It’s banned. It’s a pretty different way than how we seem to do things in the US. But I can see upsides.
- coldtea 8mo agoThat's the same in every domain when there's a profit. Doesn't mean laws and bans don't reduce the related activity dramatically.
- mqus 8mo agoOk, then I don't pay you for advertising. On an entirely unrelated note, could I buy a spot on your website(e.g. at the top) to put a piece of my own website on it? You have a news website, right? And I also have some news to share.
- 8mo ago
- skissane 8mo agoFree speech is a thing in the EU too. To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in technical legal disputes and still hasn't happened, despite the 2009 Lisbon Treaty mandating it. The US First Amendment has no exceptions as worded, but the US Supreme Court has read some into it. The Convention has exceptions listed in the text, although they are vaguely defined – but like the US, the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive case law on the scope of those exceptions. The big difference in practice is the US exceptions end up being significantly more narrow than those in Europe. However, given in both, the details of the exceptions are in case law – courts can and do change their mind, so this difference could potentially change (either by narrowing or broadening) in the decades to come.
- nickff 8mo agohttps://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-rights-act/article-10-freedom-expression#whatthelawsays https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-right... > "Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: Freedom of expression 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises. 2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary." Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02.html https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
- 8mo ago
- coldtea 8mo agoEasy: free speech was never meant for and fought for advertising. Any judicial body who says otherwise is bullshiting people. Conflating advertising with free speech is like conflating sex work with reproductive rights.
- terminalshort 8mo agoA restriction on prostitution is absolutely a restriction on reproductive rights, but there is no such right in the constitution.