zlacker

That is requiring advertisers to set the HTTP evil bit. If advertising is fine, they're happy to make it obvious that something is an ad. If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement. I'd be surprised if banning billboards caused advertising budgets to drop.

>>roenxi+(OP)
Are they happy? They resist any legislation to label things as ads and want them as unobtrusive as possible. They take over the platforms while there’s still astroturfing and sponsored content charading as regular content.

If we ban billboards at least the the countryside will look nice

>>roenxi+(OP)
In theory, anyway, billboards are prevalent sans regulation because they’re (among) the most efficient forms of advertising. That is, if the advertisers would only be spending some money on astroturf campaigns and product placement instead of billboards, it must be because they’re less effective than billboards - otherwise they’d just put that money towards the astroturf campaigns and product placement in the first place.

So banning billboards makes advertising less efficient. In theory, anyway.

>>wk_end+4b
If you step on a nail you'll be less efficient at walking for a bit. Causing random harm to people isn't really the basis for a reasonable system of rules. The regulators could cause random harm to advertisers. Society can cause random harm to anyone. You're not going to make consumers (or anyone else, for that matter) better off.

I'd much rather be fed efficient advertising on a billboard than have to worry about more astroturfing, that stuff is insidious. Cure substantially worse than the disease once advertisers have to deceptive and have even bigger incentives to hide than they already do.

And much as the anti-ads people want to skip the point, nobody ever even established that advertising is a negative thing that advertisers need to be harmed for.

>>roenxi+(OP)
> If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement.

Advertising already makes extensive use of astroturf campaigns and product placement.

Cable TV started out with no ads, as a major selling point over broadcast TV. Then they started advertising because they figured they could make more money that way. There's no reason to believe that advertisers will ever refrain from introducing ads when there's money to be made by doing so.

>>roenxi+(OP)
> If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement

Then put them in jail, that's why we've built them.

>>roenxi+(OP)
Oh really? We banned billboards here in Maine in 1978ish, and you know what we don't have? Insane attempts to get around the law! There's an occasional person hired by a shady political organization to drive a couple trucks with signs on them around, but that's already not allowed by the law, it's just poorly enforced, and it's very rare.

Know what we have instead?

Peace.