"something unpleasant that must be accepted in order to achieve a particular result"
> Advertising has consequences
Everything has consequences. That is actually a problem with many laws and rules which look only at upside and not downside.
Unfortunately and for many reasons you can't get rid of 'advertising' the only thing you can do is potentially and possibly restrict certain types of advertising and statements.
As an example Cigarette advertising was banned in 1971 on FCC regulated airwaves:
https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...
>>43580586 - 8 comments
>>43558438 - 4 comments
For example, it violates no rule to include valid Emergency Broadcast System/Emergency Alert System tones (the electronic, machine-interpretable "chirps") in a movie or TV show, or to publish that via streaming, DVD etc. But no one does this, because broadcasting spurious tones (and triggering spurious automated broadcast interruptions) carries serious first-instance fines to which FCC licensees (ie distributors via broadcast) agree as a condition of licensure. They know they aren't allowed to do this and, very occasional and expensive mishaps excepted, they won't take the risk. (1) So program material that wants to include those tones has to make sure they're excluded from the TV edit, or decide whether the verisimilitude is worth the limit on audience access.
While the specifics of course vary among cases, the basic theory of broadcast (ie distribution) as distinct from and less protected than speech, with the consequential distinction drawn specifically along the scale at which speech is distributed, seems clear.
(1) Some may note instances such as one of the Purge films (iirc) that seem to contradict this claim. Compare the tones in those examples with the ones in test samples or generated by a compliant encoder [1] for the "Specific Area Message Encoding" protocol. Even without a decoder, the FSK frequencies and timings have to be resilient to low-bandwidth channels designed to carry human voice, so it's all well within audible ranges and you can hear the difference between real tones and what a movie or show can safely use. Typically either the pitch is dropped below compliant ranges, or the encoding is intentionally corrupted, or both. But almost always, the problem is just sidestepped entirely, since it's the attention tone that everyone really notices anyway.
[1] https://cryptodude3.github.io/same/ is no more certified than mine but has, unlike my own implementation, been tested against a real EAS ENDEC. At some point I want to test mine against that one and find out how badly I screwed up reading the spec ten years ago...
This is a worse is better[1] situation. Specifically, I'm arguing against the MIT approach to lawmaking.
The MIT approach:
> The design must be consistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.
Thinking about laws like software terminates thought.
I do remember a major scandal that occurred in the 1980's when somebody posted an advertisement to usenet. At the time, there was a lot of online discussion about why this was prohibited. I looked this up, and found that the internet backbone (the NSFNET) was funded by the NSF, who enforced an acceptable-use policy, prohibiting Backbone use for purposes “not in support of research and education.” [https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/253671.253741]
So yes, it's possible, because we already did it once.
https://genius.com/Minutemen-shit-from-an-old-notebook-lyric...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supermarket_chains_in_...
https://www.kroger.com/search?query=salt&searchType=default_...
The total amount of consumer products that can be sold is bounded by consumer income. Advertising mostly moves demand around; it doesn't create more demand, at least not in the US where most consumers are spent out.
Think of taxing advertising as multilateral disarmament. Advertising is an overhead cost imposed on consumers. If everybody spends less on advertising, products get cheaper. Tax policy should thus disfavor zero-sum activity.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/04/05/The-CoSoc...
Electoral politics[0], alcohol, tobacco[1], drugs, gambling, unbridled consumerism … for example
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire
[1] https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/throwback-thursday-wh...
Yes, the purpose of "free speech" is to allow the spread of ideas. The purpose of any particular piece of speech (a book, a pamphlet, a poster, a sign, a rally, a concert, anything) is to spread an idea. The idea in that particular piece of speech.
Do you want to preserve free speech but ban speech that tries to spread an idea? Your comment would be banned because you're trying to spread that idea.
Commercial speech is a legal term for speech that promotes commerce [1].
I've been on the internet for over 25 years and there wasn't a time in which ads were more than a mild annoyance. Sure, a 5-second ad before watching a video, or a porn ad in The Pirate Bay, or an ad in a news site - I could do without them. But it's a nothingburger, and I'm grateful for those ads, as many of the sites I use would not exist without them. For anyone who's really bothered by them, there are ad blockers.
Furthermore, user data and tracking is a huge bogeyman, and it's extremely overblown. I'm yet to see any evidence of anyone having any relevant data about me AT ALL. With any luck they can profile me in that I use certain sites, or that I'm a male in my 30s and I live in X country. Generic shit at best. Relevant read: https://archive.is/kTkom
If anything, so-called targeted ads have been failing on me because I'm never suggested producs or services I'd actually buy.
So, what's the issue here? For all the issues we currently have, ADS are the worse? No.
What I think is:
a) This is an elitist in-group "luxury belief". It's like saying I hate ads signals a sort of superiority, as if you're part of people in the know, and ads are for normies or NPCs. That's for inferior people, I'm above that.
b) This is a problem for people in the autist spectrum, in which those who say they hate ads are overrepresented.
But I think there's a darker undercurrent since this view has been lobbyied and astroturfed to oblivion:
c) This is a propaganda effort to distract you from more nefarious things, or to encourage them. Such as normalizing banning and prohibiting things. Normalizing strict state-enforced regulation of the internet.
A show isn't made of matter. If you pay for it, you can't take possession of it or resell it later. If you, the buyer, aren't available at the time that it is provided, you get nothing of value out of the deal. These are attributes of services like surgery or internet connectivity, not products like antibiotics and computers. ("Health care" and "tech" are too vague to be useful.)
Getting things for free is not, as you imply, a usual attribute of services.
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). 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.
The example I like to refer to is my phone's PagerDuty ringtone, which includes a set of SAME headers (syntactically valid but encoding no meaningful alert, not that it matters) followed by the attention tone.
Nothing I personally do with that ringtone can reasonably qualify as a violation of 47 CFR 11, because I don't have a broadcast license and thus am not bound by the provisions of one, to include those related to EAS.
It would be a crime for me to broadcast that ringtone directly - not because of the nature of the transmission, but because operating an unlicensed transmitter in licensed bands is an offense. Depending on the specifics of my putative pirate-radio actions under this scenario, in theory a case might be made under 47 CFR 11.45.1 ("No person may transmit or cause to transmit...") for a fine along with the prison sentence, but I doubt anyone would see much cause to bother.
But, if I were to go to a radio station for a live interview in the course of which my PagerDuty ringtone went off and the edit delay failed, causing the ringtone to go out over the air - in that case the radio station would be considered to have violated the EAS rule.
edit: OK, I nerd-sniped myself and did look it up again; it's 47 CFR 11.45 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/section-11.45 which has been amended since I last reviewed it during the Obama administration to forbid transmission of the Attention Signal (the equal-amplitude 853/960Hz mix that raises the hair on your neck) as well as the encoded headers that will trigger automated EAS equipment. It's not terribly well written in my view, and I'm much more familiar with the technical than the legal aspects, but there's no precedent at least of which I'm aware for anyone not actually an "EAS Participant" as defined in 47 CFR 11.2 to see any kind of enforcement action over an EAS violation.
I don't dispute that, and it's not as much of an issue as long as they are in fact interconnected nodes, but the direction we're heading is that more and more countries are exploring China's and North Korea's model where they have their own sovereign internet. Russia, Iran, Myanmar have all taken concrete steps in the past 2-3 years, and plenty of other countries would do more if they had the ability to do so.
Like it or not, there is actually a notion of "too big to block." Most countries are not willing to block, say, all of Cloudflare's IP ranges, or all of Google or YouTube.
> Perhaps. You might also ask yourself why they are region-locked. I believe it will come down to advertisement, at least to a non-negligible amount.
In my experience, most region locks are based on either licensing deals or government regulations. That seems to be the case for BBC content:
"Programmes cannot be streamed outside the UK, even on holiday. This is because of rights agreements."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/help/questions/playback-issues...
Sure, some licensing deals are made on the basis of "who gets the advertising revenue", but not all of them (or probably most, for that matter).
> In any case, I'm not saying multi-language or multi-country websites and services would be prohibited from existing, only that the likes of YouTube would probably not be as profitable and may cease to exist.
Yep, I totally agree. As I said, "Take away the ad money, and I can't imagine that the remaining subscription revenue comes anywhere close to paying for the infrastructure." I'm not asserting that multi-country websites would be prohibited, but rather that if you push ownership onto governments, they'll prioritize their residents over any other users, and I wouldn't be surprised if said governments institute region locks (e.g. to limit serving costs).
I suppose the sign itself must be paid for... but many eateries are using the same signs for menus, so if owner re-purposed one of the menu signs, is there money involved? Or does owner have to dig in garbage bins to find the blackboard for free? What about writing messages straight on the wall? What about printing signs on the printer your own and taping them to the wall?
Now, don't get me wrong, I think it would be an overall improvement if those professionally-made outdoor signs get replaced by artisanal handwritten (or at least handmade) ones, but I don't think that this is what the original idea was about.
[0] https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/text-written-on-cha...
Card transaction fees here in Norway can be extremely low if the merchant uses BankAxept, much lower than Visa, Mastercard, etc. And it even works if the network is down.
If taking a human-science view, then one interesting take on capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom. There can be no "science" of capitalism.
It allows the direction of excess human psychological energy. It is the absence of regulation of anti-social criminal behaviours, by creating an allowable "grey area" between moral and wicked behaviours - what so many business people like to call "amoral". But that same energy is innovative, creative - the destruction of what is old and weak is part of any finite-sized system. The need to destroy, dominate and exploit is strong in a significant percent of the population. Any decent study of criminology is continuous with "business".
William James, in The Moral Equivalent of War [0] suggested that we coped with this in the past by having every few generations of males kill each other in wars - and of course implied that it's mainly a gendered issue. During frontier times, as the European settlers conquered America and other lands, there was ample "space" for exploitation as that energy was directed against "nature" (and the indigenous folks who were considered part of "nature" as opposed to "civilisation"). Now we've run out of space. The only target left for that energy is each other.
Social-"ism" etc are projects to try controlling that nature by reducing "individualism" (and insecurity-based consumerism is an obvious first target). It's major fault is that the anti-social criminals tend be want to be the ones doing the controlling - just wearing the mask of civility and preaching the primacy of "the group".
If we cannot change human nature we must find a new outlet for that energy. Space exploration as a new frontier always looked good, but in reality it's something we are unlikely to achieve before self-destructing the technological civilisation needed to support it.
That leaves little else but a kind of cultural revolution. The pharmaceutically catalysed version of that in the 1960s is worth studying to see where and why it went wrong. See Huxley.
Any realistic systematic change would need to address this "problem" of the individual ego, creating some new focus that is the "moral equivalent" of war.
If any French speakers are interested, I believe it was this YouTube channel (which is very interesting anyway for discussions about fascism, advertising, manipulation, etc.): https://youtube.com/@hacking-social
That said, after thinking about it for a few more minutes, I can think of one simple addendum to my initial criteria. I wrote about it here[1], so I won't repeat myself.
It's asinine that this discussion is taken to extreme ends. We don't need to ban all forms of advertising and get into endless discussions about semantics and free speech in order to stop the abuse of the current system. There is surely a middle ground that does it in a sensible way. The only reason we don't fix this is because the powers that be have no incentives to do so, and the general population is conditioned and literally brainwashed to not care about it.
[1]: >>43599948
Many “influencers” would have to go back to being amateurs. That’s ok. Some would accept backhanders, but they risk prosecution, which is actually possible [0].
[0] https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/government-orders-maori-infl...
I've made a product. The people who use it, like it. But I have no online following or presence, and I'm really not the kind of charismatic person who could build one. All the "community" places where I could share it in good faith are incredibly hostile to self promotion, I think because of the wave of people selling vibecoded openai wrappers as language tutors.
I can pay £40 for reddit ads, and while it has negative ROI, it gives me lots of feedback that I can use to iterate. Sure, my project seems to be a commercial dead end - people find it valuable, but most people don't find it quite valuable enough to pay for the high cost of translation - but I still think those ads had a lot of value.
That said, I use an adblocker myself, I wish more intelligent people worked on rockets rather than targeting algorithms, and I do agree that ads have a negative effect in a lot of places - it's just that they do have a real (and IMO moral) utility in some places. If you banned advertising for everything, you'd just encourage bribing moderators to let you self-promote or ensure only people with existing followings can make things.
(it's https://nuenki.app, if anyone's curious)
In many places where these signs are banned, old grandfathered-in examples have become beloved heritage landmarks.
The musée Carnavallet in Paris has a fascinating exhibit on the city's history based entirely on old business advertising signs.
An example here in Vancouver: https://vancouversun.com/news/whats-the-future-bow-mac-sign-...)
I detest a lot of modern forms of advertising as much as the next guy, but at the same time I think we'd be choking off a lot of interesting and enriching human expression by trying to remove it entirely.
People getting paid to do things do worse than otherwise[1]. They do better when not paid. The quality of work often gets worse when they get more. It's well established. As counterintuitive as sometimes it seem to be.
What I'm essentially saying is, if you think people are right now getting paid to do something bad to the society(e.g. ads), you might want to keep them hooked and tied to the money and not to something else, like advertising for its own sake.
Sure, YouTube probably takes more off the top than Patreon. But YouTube also splits it up based on who you’re watching. I probably watch 30+ YouTube channels per week, some of which I find on the explore page and don’t even know the name of. I would never subscribe to 30+ Patreons. I think YouTube Premium is a good compromise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy#Perfect_soluti...
FWIW, that’s not entirely accurate. The tenets of free speech include a long list of exceptions. In the US, commercial speech and specifically advertisements do not necessarily have free speech protections, by design, especially when it comes to false advertising, misleading advertising, and anything else ads might have that is on the list of exceptions including IP, defamation, and false statements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
US law is not a natural right and does not grant the right to say anything. You can claim and exercise a perceived natural right to say anything, you just won’t be protected from punishment under US law for saying certain things.
https://linforme.files.sirius.press/files/1742914627793-Rapp...
There's no clearer lack of consent than attempts by advertisers to circumvent, block, or ban ad-blockers.
These advertisers could choose to put up paywalls but that would harm their search rankings, so they don't. Instead, they play games with cloaking [1] and other SEO techniques in order to bypass the user's wishes and show them ads (or even ads + cloaked paywalls).
At least YouTube offers a paid premium service which remains ad-free.
A big reason for that is influence from Edward Bernays:
"Edward Louis Bernays was an American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". While credited with advancing the profession of public relations, his techniques have been criticized for manipulating public opinion, often in ways that undermined individual autonomy and democratic values."
Bernays' mother, Anna, was Sigmund Freud's sister. There seemed to be a talent in that family in understanding the human psyche, and how to utilize that understanding.
https://linforme.files.sirius.press/files/1742914627793-Rapp...
https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan....
(I tend to think of the aether in which ads are transmitted as the public, uh, space)
> I believe that would be very difficult, it would likely create some additional interesting cases (are adblockers now fraud?)
I don't know if companies consider it fraud, but for example Telly is giving away a TV as long as you let it eat your data and serve you ads, and if they figure out you're preventing that somehow they want the TV back [0]. So models like this countenance some kind of evasion at least a little.
I've asked other people this same question because most of the time platforms don't make advertising opt-in/out, basically for any amount of money. The best answer I've gotten--which I buy--is that the value in ads/marketing/data isn't 1 person, it's the aggregate. So like, if you have 1M users generating $100k, but then 500k of those users opt-out each for a dollar, ostensibly it seems like this is equivalent but the value of data on 500k users isn't $500k, it's substantially less, so the opt-out isn't a dollar, it's more like $5 or something, which makes this a non-option. So conceiving of this business model as a kind of "advertising lets you have this 'for free'" is only true in the most literal sense, as long as you don't think your individual data or privacy has any value or you ignore the implication that you could opt-out for whatever that value is.
Beyond that, it creates perverse incentives. We don't think that advertising benefits people, we have a whole other category called "Public Service Announcements" that kind of benefits people, and represents a sliver of actual "advertising". Say what you want about ads for diabetes meds or whatever, but they're not PSAs. The value to the consumer isn't the ad but what the ad funds, which makes platforms (tv stations, social media network, whatever) very interested in finding the exact line where you have both maximum advertising revenue and maximum engagement... which is a euphemistic way of saying "we want to trap you in our platform for as long as possible so we can make as many ad dollars on you as possible". That's bad! Even the value you're supposedly getting--the content--is now geared towards making you watch more ads instead of whatever you thought you were getting (sober political commentary, funny dance videos, makeup tips, whatever). This perfectly diagnoses the slop of media these days; I think there's no real disagreement here.
Finally, I think advertising is just 100% weird on its own. It sounds innocuous, but the business of advertising is persuasion: fine at the "marketing grad out of uni" level, real terrifying at the "billions of dollars convincing people to buy things they don't need and feel things they wouldn't otherwise feel about 'brands' or issues" level. There is no real regulation of this either; companies can spend as much money as they want literally blanketing our buildings, skies, cars, and media broadly with their message, which can be things like, "Happy Mother's Day" or "don't be a sucker: buy Bitcoin". This is also pretty bad.
Maybe jumping right to "let's ban all advertising" isn't the right way to start this conversation. Fair enough. But I do think we're starting to come around to the notion that advertising as we know it today isn't a good idea and we should do something about it.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23910631/telly-free-tv-a...
>What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research, which means orienting business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable. The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the consumer, a patient reassured by psychodramas.[2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
[2]: Technopoly by Neil Postman
> Yes.
> The United States government is not allowed to regulate commerce unless it is interstate
This does not state that the Federal Government cannot define what is legal and illegal. This is done pretty regularly. 24 states have legalized weed and 39 have made it available for medical use, YET it is still illegal under federal ruling and these dispensaries get raided by Federal Agents routinely. There is no violation of the Constitution here.
I'll admit that my previous comment was quite terse, but I make a better point over here: >>43606823
And remember, law doesn't work like code. It needs to be interpreted with intent. The letter of the law is imprecise and is not meant to be absolute. If you know what someone means, don't derail the conversation as if you have a gotcha. You're welcome to request better language, but you don't "win" by misrepresenting what is well understood. We're trying to communicate, not exploit software.
In between you doing that and me thinking on it overnight, I ended up writing up my thoughts as a blog post [0], which I have submitted here to HN as well [1].
[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
[1]: >>43620407
Feels similar to a point in a larger rant about bloated page sizes:
https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
"I think we need to ban third-party tracking, and third party ad targeting.
Ads would become dumb again, and be served from the website they appear on.
Accepted practice today is for ad space to be auctioned at page load time. The actual ads (along with all their javascript surveillance infrastructure) are pulled in by the browser after the content elements are in place.
In terms of user experience, this is like a salesman arriving at a party after it has already started, demanding that the music be turned off, and setting up their little Tupperware table stand to harass your guests. It ruins the vibe."
No, actually, it is. Speech involving transgender individuals is being restricted.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/nhl-womens-history-junior-range...
References to trans people have even been scrubbed from NPS pages about Stonewall. It's heinous.
[0] Slightly tangentially, to be ignored, until later (after careful reconsideration of doubts raised in your [1]: https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/29610[2])
In particular, to consider how unification of the 2 notions of excludability/rivalry can lead to the 2 actions of subsidies/taxation coalescing (thus going "beyond good & evil")
[2] >>43621295
[4] https://www.econlib.org/the-correlation-between-excludabilit...
>Yet in the real world, both excludability and rivalry lie on a continuum.
Exactly. Congress funding something tends to produce better work than corporate advertising funded stuff. Look at NASA, or national science grants, or Mr Rodgers as a comparison. Subscription funded media and Congress funded media being available, are you seriously saying Marlboro sponsored shows are better as an alternative?
> TV advertising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_in_television
https://www.strategus.com/blog/the-history-of-commercials-an...
"1941: The FCC lifts its ban on TV advertising, and the first commercial airs"
> And those papers still had advertising. The subscriptions never paid the total cost of newspaper publications
No, that was not the case until the advent of the penny press of the 1830s. Before the 1 cent penny press, standard newspapers cost 6 cents per paper and was not mostly funded by advertising, although they had small amounts of advertisements. They would have survived just fine if advertising was banned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press "The main revenue for the penny press was advertising while other newspapers relied heavily on high-priced subscriptions to finance their activities."
> 1880s
I would consider that roughly "100 years or so" ago, within the correct amount of sigfigs. It's certainly closer to 100 years ago than 200 years ago. And even if you did bring up examples from 150 or 199 years ago- so what? The point is that advertising started its dominance during this century or so, quibbling over a few decades is pointless.
> You mean the same government today that is rewriting history, purging government websites and has a list of words that agencies can’t say? You want that government having more control of private speech?
Yes. Unashamedly.
Your line of thinking is how we got Citizens United. Your line of thinking is imprudently painting all government action under the same brush, where state propaganda is conflated with things like banning money in politics or banning billboards. Hint: banning advertising looks a lot more like an anti-Citizens United good thing, than some 1984 Ministry of Truth.
> Would the current government pay for access to Fox News and The Guardian or just Fox News?
... you can literally just go look for yourself? https://www.nypl.org/blog/2017/09/25/magazines-and-newspaper...
Here's government funded access to paid newspapers. The Guardian is literally already included in here.
> Well seeing that you are factually wrong about history
No, you're the one who's confidently incorrect.
> 24 states have legalized weed and 39 have made it available for medical use, YET it is still illegal under federal ruling.
Congress at least has to pretend it has enumerated powers and is using them, most of the time, "promote the general welfare" notwithstanding. So do you know the basis for that federal "ruling"? Smoking weed, including weed grown in your backyard, substantially affects interstate commerce.
EDIT for source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/801
> And remember, law doesn't work like code. It needs to be interpreted with intent.
Is this not my point rather than yours? Open the door for ill intent and the imprecise nature of the law means that the first people with ill intent will exploit it.
"Congress shall make no law" is not a rule we can use for absolutely everything, of course, but where it does not exist, Congress historically shall pretty much inevitably make a law. So the answer to "is my unpopular speech advertising if adverting can be regulated?" is "yes." Of course it will be regulated. Others have pointed out that this applies to lots of laws, not just speech, to which I say... yeah?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_United_State... [2] https://www.wallis.rochester.edu/assets/pdf/wallisseminarser...