zlacker

One thing that I think makes only targeting paid advertising a problem: companies often do more than one thing.

Is it ok that when you're watching broadcast/network TV, they advertise internet or cellular service, because the conglomerate that owns the TV station also owns an ISP and cell carrier?

Is it ok if you're using a popular web search engine, and they advertise their own hosted business productivity suite?

I think no, we should not allow these things. But no money (or consideration, or whatever) has exchanged hands here.

>>kelnos+(OP)
I'm actually okay with the things you mentioned. The really salient example for me is: should Disney be allowed to advertise Disney movies and Disney products at Disney world? The answer seems to be a pretty obvious yes to me. If you are at Disney World, you are in the "Disney Ecosystem", and so there's nothing wrong with Disney pushing more Disney stuff at you - that's just part of the experience.

I think that similar exceptions extend to a TV network that's pushing its own products at you while you are watching the station. No consideration has been provided to push the ad, so you are in whatever ecosystem.

How do you know when you've crossed the line into abuse? Well, we have anti-monopoly laws for that. At some point an ecosystem becomes so big it's a monopoly that needs to be broken up, and after it gets broken up it can't self-deal across the broken pieces anymore. So just like we already have good legal infrastructure in place for figuring out when "consideration" has happened, we also have good (well, maybe not good enough lately) legal infrastructure in place for figuring out when a company is too big and too able to self-deal.