This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech?
The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed?
What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?
What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?
I hate advertising and propaganda. But the hard part IMO is drawing the line. Where's the line?
We don't need to go into absurd discussions in order to prevent 99% of the harm that comes from modern advertising.
The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising.
Giving out "free" samples? Presumably someone is being paid to do that, so advertising.
We can later quibble about edge cases and how to handle someone putting up a sign for their business. Many countries have regulations about visual noise, so that should be considered as well.
But it's pretty easy to distinguish advertising that seeks to manipulate, and putting a stop to that. Hell, we could start by surfacing the dark data broker market and banning it altogether. That alone should remove the most egregious cases of privacy abuse.
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
this is obviously not a clear line. No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Even worse: sometimes a genuine opinion becomes an incentivized one later on as someone's audience grows
the good news is there is a solution that doesn't require playing these cat & mouse games and top down authority deciding what is allowed speech: you want better ways to reach the people who want your product.
Ads are a bad solution to a genuine problem in society. They will persist as long as the problem exists. People who sell things need ways to find buyers. Solve the root problem of discernment rather than punishing everyone indiscriminately
> People who sell things need ways to find buyers.
No, you've got that backwards. People who sell things should have a way of announcing their product to the world. Buyers who are interested in that type of product should be the ones seeking out the companies, not the other way around.
The current approach of companies pushing their products to everyone is how we got to the mess we are in today. Companies will cheat, lie, and break every law in existence in order to make more money. Laws need to be made in order for companies to stop abusing people.
You know what worked well? Product catalogs. Companies buy ad space in specific print or digital media. Consumers can consult that media whenever they want to purchase a specific product. This is what ecommerce sites should be. Give the consumer the tools to search for specific product types, brands, specifications, etc.; get rid of fake reviews and only show honest reviews from verified purchases and vetted reviewers, and there you go. Consumers can discover products, and companies can advertise.
This, of course, is only wishful thinking, since companies would rather continue to lie, cheat, and steal, as that's how the big bucks are made.
I honestly find it disturbing that with all of humanity's progress and all the brilliant technology we've invented, all of our communication channels are corrupted by companies who want to make us buy stuff, and by propaganda from agencies that want to make us think or act a certain way. Like holy shit, people, is this really the best we can do? It's exhausting having to constantly fight against being manipulated or exploited.
Product catalogs are advertising... The Sears catalog was full of products made by other companies, and Sears paid a ton of money to get those catalogs to as many people as possible
I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is that the catalog is "pull" in the sense that if you decide to keep your catalog, the advertising is inside the catalog, and you have to physically retrieve your catalog and open it to find what you're looking for (when you're looking for it), instead of the "push" method of running advertisements in every news article and on every bus.
>I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is [...]
The discussion got muddied because in this subthread, it morphed from "What if we made _all_ advertising illegal?" (original article's exact words) ... to gp's (imiric) less restrictive example of "acceptable" advertising such as "product catalogs".
So when the person crafting a reply is using the article author's absolutist position of no ads, the distinction doesn't matter.
You forget that people used to get spammed with catalogs, and you could opt-out of them with the postal service because it was such a problem. Receiving too many catalogs or magazines is absolutely a negative form of advertising, even though it is less of an issue today.
When Sears delivered the brand new Sear catelog to my door every year, all nicely wrapped in plastic with shiny images of brand new products, that sure as hell wasn't "pull".
I think the point is that they're opt-in advertising. You didn't pick up a book and find pages from the Sears catalog interspersed with the pages you were trying to read. You picked up the Sears catalog when you were considering a purchase and wanted to see what was available.
When you visit a ad-supported news website, you're opting in too... No one is forcing you to use that website versus it's ad-free subscription alternatives, it's just that most people have decided they'd prefer the former
The difference is that a catalog is advertising that the viewer actually wants to see. Ads on a news site are ads that the viewer merely tolerates because they go with the thing they want to see.
What if we took the approach of creating a clear legal distinction between advertising companies and non-advertising companies?
For example, if you want to be an advertising company, there are limits on what and how you can publish (such as having to use pull instead of push channels), and you don't get to also try to be a product or service company. If you want to be a non-advertising company, then you can't publish advertising.
This seems effective and also a much easier scenario to envision for those who find legal restrictions on speech to be unpalatable or inconceivable. It is actually not that outlandish at all; rather it's well within the bounds of what we already do. We already categorize companies by function and apply all kinds of different rules (restrictions on where and when and how they can operate, requirements for licensing and registration, environmental standards, liability standards, taxation rules) to companies based on what they produce or what purpose they serve, and we already accept that doing so has societal benefits.
There is also plenty of precedent for regulations that discourage cross-category operations precisely to simplify enforcement and manage risk. Healthcare providers are separated from payers; drugs cannot also be dietary supplements; legal businesses can't combine with non-law businesses; and so on. Even if cross-category operations aren't completely banned, the rules create friction and deterrence that still has important effects.
The appeal of a catalog is to interest a prospective buyer, not the general public. Once you start targeting the general public, you run into the issues the GP has identified.
> all of our communication channels are corrupted by companies who want to make us buy stuff
This is simply not true. You can buy or rent a server right now, run any kind of communication software on it that you want, and use that to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world, 100% ad-free. There are even pre-existing software stacks, like Mastodon, that make setting this up trivial.
I honestly find it disturbing that you don't appear to realise that you are asking for control over someone else's communication platform.
One person's desire for ignorance should not force that on everyone.
Don't want an add supported service? Don't use it. Don't want ads on TV? Don't watch it. Don't want ads on others property? Let them control the look of your property.
Lots of people like ads because it's how they discover movies, restaurants, better financial help, better doctors, new hobbies, and a world they'd not have found otherwise.
> I honestly find it disturbing that with all of humanity's progress and all the brilliant technology we've invented, all of our communication channels are corrupted by...
Honestly, you couldn't have said that any better. I always think exactly about that. Where we are today, the technology that we have at our disposal, and yet this whole machinery working 24hs non-stop to put these consumption ideas on our heads, cheap propaganda and useless stuff to manipulate us like puppets. Really disgusting.
> The current approach of companies pushing their products to everyone is how we got to the mess we are in today.
The most prosperous society ever known to man, a veritable wonderland of consumer choice and entrepreneurial opportunity that draws people from all over the world to study visit and move here. What a mess.
So we have some annoying advertising. Small price.
Having lived overseas, the US isn't a "veritable wonderland of consumer choice". There are 5 grocery store chains, for the great majority of the country there is one way to travel: car. At the store (Kroger), I can buy 2 kinds of salt on the shelves. Where is the "veritable choice"? It has been told in the advertising but the reality is very limited.
There are scores of grocery chains in the US, not 5. There are thousands of independent grocery stores. And literally hundreds of salt options, even at Kroger.
Seriously. Even the most basic supermarkets stock like at least 10 different kinds of salt. Iodized, non, kosher, sea, for grinding, packets, in disposable shakers, etc., and often a couple brands, e.g. Morton and Diamond. And a larger supermarket will have pink salt (Himalayan), various fancy sea salts, fleur de sel, flavored salts...
The "veritable wonderland" is big cities; come visit NYC or LA. Also affluent smaller cities. Elsewhere, it depends. You can reach parts of the consumption cornucopia by accessing sites like Amazon from basically anywhere in the US though.
Meh. This scenario does not seem broadly representative of the US to me. I mean, I don't live anywhere exceptional and near me alone there are Food Lion, Harris Teeter, Wegmans, Trader Joes, Aldi, and Whole Foods stores in addition to the grocery sections at Walmart and Target. And if one drives a little further, there are Publix, H-Mart, and several smaller local outfits - Compare, Li Ming's Global Mart, etc.
And just Food Lion alone has probably half a dozen to a dozen different salt varieties on the spice aisle.
I'm sure there are places in the US where choice is more limited, but that's the thing about a country of the size of the United States... you can find all kind of scenarios in different regions.
I've lived in a few overseas countries and consumer choice is absolutely limited. As a result you see a lot of people trying to import things they want that they can't otherwise get in their country.
If your hobby is cooking, good luck getting Arabic food ingredients in say Vietnam.
But in the US? If your own city doesn't have a store that carries them, you could easily order them online for next day delivery.
> So we have some annoying advertising. Small price.
Ha. Tell that to the millions of victims from false advertising of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma.
That prosperous society and veritable wonderland is not looking so great these days. Perhaps the fact that the tools built for psychologically manipulating people into buying things can also be used to manipulate people into thinking and acting a certain way could be related to your current situation? Maybe those tools shouldn't have been available to everyone, including your political adversaries?
> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels
This is not really advertising, but it’s not really a problem either. People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Besides, there are only so many channels you can possibly control.
> nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion!
Sure. Maybe this is advertising that slips through. If all were down to is people advertising their friends’s products for no money then we would have eliminated 99.99% of the problem.
Further, if you have a highly influential channel, the cost of promoting a non genuine opinion about a friend’s product would almost certainly hurt your reputation, providing a strong disincentive to do such a thing.
> People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should.
Similar thing happened with Amazon recently. They copied bestsellers and promoted their own products in their store leading to death of other companies. Now you are just making this loop in steroids. All the small companies would be forced to be sold to companies with eyeballs like Meta and Google.
> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion.
But this is not the vast majority of 'advertising' or where advertising causes so much harm. A single individual has much less power to manipulate a single other individual, let alone thousands of other individuals. It takes millions of dollars to hire people with specialized marketing skills to do that.
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
The line is absolutely not clear.
Is ABC allowed to run commercials for its own shows?
ABC is owned by Disney. Is ABC allowed to run commercials for Disney shows? Is it allowed to run commericals for Disney toys?
Can ABC run commercials for Bounty paper towels, in exchange for Bounty putting ads for ABC shows on its paper towel packaging?
Literally no money is being exchanged so far.
I'm familiar with a lot of gray areas that courts regularly have to decide on. But trying to distinguish advertising from free speech sounds like the most difficult free speech question I've ever come across. People are allowed to express positive opinions about products, and even try to convince their friends, that's free speech. Trying to come up with a global definition of advertising that doesn't veer into censorship... I can't even imagine. Are you suddenly prevented from blogging about a water bottle you like, because you received a coupon for a future water bottle? Because if you use that coupon, it's effectively money exchanged. What if your blog says you wouldn't have bothered writing about the bottle, but you were so impressed with the coupon on top of everything else it got you to write?
You can argue over any of these examples, but that's the point: you're arguing, because the line isn't clear.
I agree with the general thought - doing something like this would give giant mega corporations a huge leg up from verticals.
> Can ABC run commercials for Bounty paper towels, in exchange for Bounty putting ads for ABC shows on its paper towel packaging?
I was with you until this one
Under both IRS and GAAP rules, that's equivalent to money changing hands. So in a hypothetical "no money for advertising" world, that would be over the line.
ok, what if ABC buys a 55% stake in Bounty and puts ads for them because they are the same owner now? What if it's 10% stake? Can they claim (truthfully) they want to increase the value of their stock?
You're trying to make this sound very complicated but it's not. In this world without paid advertising, ABC can advertise their own shows. They cannot advertise things for other companies, whether they own them or not.
A network of TV stations could cross-promote across all stations. Yes, that would be unfair, but no more unfair than the current situation where whoever has more money can have their ads seen everywhere. Fairness between companies isn't the goal, it's less manipulation and noise for the rest of us.
There's an example of a TV station that already has to follow these rules: the BBC.
> it's less manipulation and noise for the rest of us.
That's not what would happen.
You'd just end up with diverse companies consolidating into single companies and advertising just as much as before, but for their own products in their own media properties.
Coca-Cola will merge with a movie studio and a television network and a billboard company to put its product placement and ads everywhere in properties it just simply owns. Probably merging with Proctor-Gamble or Unilever while it's at it.
BetterHelp will merge with a bunch of supplements companies and purchase a bunch of top podcast studios, so top podcasts will continue to advertise the same exact things as before.
And so on.
It's wishful thinking to suppose that companies wouldn't find ways around this. Advertising is that powerful and important that it'll be worth it to them.
> Except that shows aren't products, they're services, so they'd be exempt from this proposal.
What does that mean? What's a service in this definition? Surely not in the normal definition of a "service", as in health care or tech? Like is a movie a service too?
Or do you just mean something you get for free because it's a show on their own channel? What if you had to pay for shows ala carte?
I suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_(economics). Some authors use the term "product" in opposition to "service", while others consider services to be a type of product. Not being clear about that distinction is one of the fatal flaws in imiric's proposal.
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.
That makes even less sense than I thought. So things that "are not made out of matter" can be advertised. Like I can advertise YouTube, AWS, Netflix, pretty much 99% of online services, movies, a doctor practice as long as I just do diagnostics, landscaping as long as I just cut and clean. I just can't advertise anything where I'd hand you something "made out of matter". What kind of sense does that make?
The networks themselves wouldn't be banned, but they wouldn't be permitted to endorse or give airtime to a candidate in exchange for money, I'd assume is the idea.
They're not endorsing candidates in exchange for money. They do use their money to run their networks, which they use to promote certain candidates and positions.
Re: "The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising."
What if they are running the story on local ocean tides or soup kitchens? They are doing this to sell more newspapers or more airtime for advertisers.. does this mean there is an "exchange for money" under your rule?
Well, I'd argue that all stories don't fulfill the same purpose, and that such a small story doesn't have enough importance to the broader public for there to be an "exchange for money" of the type I've described.
But also, it seems pretty clear that political stories specifically generate massive cash flow for media, through clicks and "online engagement", the spectacle of debates, video of gaffes, and so on. I'd assume that is why the political "season" lasts longer and longer? The politicians certainly take advantage of this and use it to their ends. The media seem not to care as long as they continue to get "paid", in their way, and have access.
What if the candidates did it for free? Aren't they already, because the networks are platforming them? Wouldn't the mere fact of showing a candidate be an endorsement in itself?
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
Let's say I have a journal. It costs money to subscribe. It covers a topic that many college students also study.
Can I give the school a free copy? Can I give the teachers one? Can I give the students one? Is this advertising? When does the amount of "value" become offensive?
> surfacing the dark data broker market and banning it altogether.
This is why this has become a modern problem. I can live with erring on the side of free speech when it comes to advertising, but there is no side to err on when it comes to analytics and targeting.
The fact that the boundary can be a bit blurry does not prevent it to be useful. Yes there may be corner cases to thunk about ans that can vary, as with all laws. It's bot perfect but its better than current out of control situation.
So is fraud, libel, extortion, sexual harassment, impersonating a police officer, perjury, incitement, performing a stage play without a license from the writer, etc. but this hasn't stopped congress from passing laws to abridge the freedom of these particular kinds of speech. It's quite clear that the "freedom of speech" referenced in the 1st amendment pertains to expressing one's own sentiment, and that this is not the same as expressing something one is paid to express. The mental gymnastics necessary to convince oneself that spending money is protected speech are likewise ridiculous.
Legislatures have tried to pass laws regulating commercial speech in various ways and the track record is generally that they get their asses handed to them by the court, because this is basically the most protected right in our system.
It's fine if everyone here wants to fantasize about some alternative system, but "we make advertising illegal" is not something that can happen in our system of governance.
Courts consistently interpreting a law wrongly is cause for amending said law to clarify its intent. Amending the constitution is certainly something that can happen within the system of governance as evidenced by the fact that we are discussing an amendment to it. It's just a law, not a religious document. Granted, clarifying the 1st to read more like Madison's draft is unlikely to happen anytime soon for cultural reasons.
When it's literally 100 years of consistent jurisprudence this kind of argument loses some of its teeth. Liberal courts, conservative courts, modern courts, old courts, they all seem to agree on this point.
> Legislatures have tried to pass laws regulating commercial speech in various ways and the track record is generally that they get their asses handed to them by the court,
I mean, no, legislatures (both Congress and the states) successfully limit commercial speech all the time, which is, for instance, why no one in Gen X has seen or heard a TV or radio ad for cigarettes in the US when they were old enough to purchase them.
> but "we make advertising illegal" is not something that can happen in our system of governance.
Broadly banning "advertising" (under almost any plausible definition that would be reasonably accord with common use) would probably fall afoul off the 1st Amendment as it is today, but our Constitutional system of government includes provision for changing any feature of the Constitution (nominally, except the equal representation of states in the Senate, but that restriction neither protects itself from being amended out, nor protects all the functions of the Senate from being amended out and the equal representation being at zero seats per state, so it is more of a symbolical than substantive restriction.)
Simply make it illegal to base the choice of what ad to show on any data derived from the person accessing the content. The same content accessed by different people from different locations should have the same ad probability distribution. You can still do old-school targeting by associating static content with certain types of ad a priori, as long as the shown content is independent of the user and not generated from any user data.
I'd happily support that but the harms of advertising go beyond the problems of surveillance capitalism so heavily restricting ads seems like a good idea on its own.
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
So that would exclude:
- listing your house, or car in the classifieds
- buying a sign for your business (ad discussed in other posts)
- buying a garage sale sign
- buying a for sale sign, or flyers for your house for sale
- paying a realtor to sell your house
- paying a reporter or professional reviewer to write a review. Even if they are paid by a newspaper/magazine/consumer report site, money exchanged hands for something that promotes a product.
- distributing a catalog
- paying a cloud provider or VPS provider or website hosting service to host a website that promotes your product
Also, what exactly constitutes a "product"? Does a service count? If not, that is a pretty big loophole. What about a job position? Or someone looking for employment?
And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists. Word of mouth isn't very effective if you don't have any customers to begin with. I would expect removing all advertising to have a chilling effect on innovation and new businesses.
To be clear, I think the current advertising environment is terrible, and unhealthy, and needs to be fixed. But I think that removing all advertisement would have some negative ramifications, especially if the definition of an ad is too simplistic.
It's remarkable that you put all that thought into coming up with holes in my one-line argument, and no thought into steelmanning it.
Since we're coming up with hypothetical laws and loopholes, here is a simple addendum to my original argument:
- Only applies for companies, and only to those with more than $100,000 ARR.
There. That avoids penalizing most of the personal advertising scenarios you mentioned. Since laws are never a couple of sentences long, I'm sure with more thought we'd be able to find a good balance that prevents abuse, but not legitimate use cases for informing people about a product or service.
Again, the goal is not to get into philosophical discussions about what constitutes advertising, and banning commercial speech, or whatever constitutional right exists. The goal is to prevent companies from abusing people's personal data, profiling them, selling their profiles on dark markets, allowing mass psychological manipulation that is threating our democratic processes, and in general, from corrupting every communication channel in existence. Surely there are ways of accomplishing this without endless discussions about semantics and free speech.
But, as I've said in other threads, this is all wishful thinking. There is zero chance that the people in power who achieved it by these means will suddenly decide to regulate themselves and kill their golden goose. Nothing short of an actual revolution will bring this system down.
> And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists.
Agreed. In the olden days before digital ads, product catalogs worked well. Companies would buy ad space in specific print media, and consumers interested in buying a product would consult the catalog for the type of product they're looking for. Making ads pull rather than push solves this awareness problem proponents of advertising deem so important. The reason they prefer the push approach is because it's many times more profitable for all involved parties. The only victims in this system are the people outside of it. The current system is making a consumer of everyone every time they interact with any content, when the reality is that people are only consumers when they're actively looking to buy something. Most of the time we just want to consume the content we're interested in, without being sold anything. It's the wrong approach, with harmful results, and the only reason we stuck with it is because it's making someone else very rich. It's absolute insanity.
Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising.
Listing a house for sale on an agent’s website: not advertising.
Promoting that listing or the agent on the home page of a local news site: advertising
etc…
Some cases will be harder, all are decidable. We are talking about law not code, so there’s no need for a perfect algorithm, the legal system is designed precisely to deal with these sorts of question.
Exactly. You're paying a realtor to promote your house, including on their site, to sell it.
Zero difference from hiring a TV channel to promote your product, on their channel, to sell it.
Which is why trying to define advertising in a way that bans it is not simple at all.
GP says "Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising."
OK. Now the realtor adds a blog. They start publishing news about the real estate business. With listings mixed in. Congrats, you've got a newspaper with ads for homes. Are you ready to say the realtor can't publish news? Isn't that censorship?
Also, home listings aren't "factual". They're promotional. They focus on pros and omit cons. They have photos that hide the ugly parts. They're ads for homes, period.
Surely there is a difference between me (private person ) selling my 1 car/house or company Y advertising their latest car model (they want to sell 1000ds).
Yes, there's a difference in the number of items you're selling.
There isn't a difference in terms of the fact that it's advertising a sale. Nor is it relevant if you're doing so personally, as a sole proprietor, as a partnership, as an S corp or as a C corp. Advertising something for sale is advertising something for sale. Ads are ads.
Also, on the realtor's site they're listing hundreds of homes. Not any different from your local car dealership advertising their hundreds of vehicles. They're both corporations listing ads.
I'm wondering if it's possible that the reality might be working the other way around than perceived. Could there be steaming can of worms that modern rampant commercial advertising is venting and holding down?
Studio Ghibli made ~$220m on Spirited Away. What if they made $2.2T, is the quality going to go up, or down? And, would there be less ads, if no one made even $2.2 on them?
You're presenting an idea here by means of a lot of implicit leaps, and I don't even know where I'm supposed to leap to at each stage. It's like a logic game that I'm failing at.
What's the connection between adverts and the amount of money Ghibli made on their best-loved movie?
Hmm, maybe none, maybe you're using Ghibli as a metaphor for products that make money through adverts. And maybe the implied answer to the next question is that their next movie, The Cat Returns, would have been higher quality if they had made even more money on Spirited Away. So what you could be saying is that crippling the ad industry would lead to lower quality products, without even much reducing the number of (less effective) adverts that get made.
That's one way to read what you said, but I feel like I got it wrong.
No, I'm saying what I had said in the first paragraph of my comment. I'm saying, the reward might not be the fuel, but it could be fire retardant, and you might not want to cut it off.
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.
Fear the work of unpaid ad execs! They won't stop making adverts, it's what they live for, money or no money! The adverts will continue to be made, but now they will be made for love, and they will be extremely high quality! And if you think ordinary adverts are bad, wait until you see what adverts are like when they come from the heart!
I wonder if I should point out that your link says that it's when people stop being paid that quality declines. However, if "ads for ads' sake" became a thing, it would presumably look like propaganda, in support of whatever the advert-artist personally cares about.
> Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising.
Except that it is, and it's why social media is so important for marketeers; the best kind of advertising is word-to-mouth, so generating discourse about products is big business.
Anyway, without strict legislation and tight controls on social media / chat / RL, how would you know whether they would be getting paid or not?
It's a legal and / or philosophical conundrum, not to mention even more of a legal whack-a-mole than it already is.
> is money being exchanged in order to promote a product?
So if I paint my store front's sign myself, I'm good, but if I pay a signwriter to paint it, it's illegal?
I guess I better become "friends" with a signwriter, so that they don't mind making a sign or two for me "for free". And so that I don't mind giving them a widget or two from my store sometime in the future.
Most likely you paid someone to make the sign, and someone else to put it up. Even if you made and installed the sign yourself, you paid for the materials.
I am thinking outside blackboard ones, where owners write message in chalk [0] - they don't pay anyone to write the words, nor do they pay anyone to "install" it (= take it out).
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.
Commercial speech is also widely recognized to have lesser First Amendment protection than personal, political, or ideological speech, and there are cases of advertisers losing in court, c.f. Spann v J.C. Penney, as well as decisions that explicitly limit the First Amendment protections of commercial speech.
Trying to ban all advertising of course wouldn’t get anywhere (especially under the current SCOTUS), and the article’s author clearly hasn’t really thought through the implications. But there is a legal door that is ajar, in the Central Hudson test, and could potentially be widened by arguing that some classes of today’s advertising are against the public interest; the First Amendment is already not blanket covering all commercial speech.
There is no conceivable Supreme Court configuration that would uphold a ban on advertising.
Meanwhile, even the original Central Hudson test --- if commercial speech concerns lawful activity and isn't misleading, the government (1) needs a substantial interest and (2) must narrowly tailor the restriction --- was inhospitable to the sentiment in this blog post. But Central Hudson has as I understand it gotten more restrictive, not less; for instance, Sorrell, which was a bipartisan decision, applies heightened scrutiny to regulations under Central Hudson.
You can keep cigarette ads out of Highlights for Kids. But you're not going to be able to keep Nike from buying up ad inventory, and you'll certainly not be able to regulate political and cause advertising (and "propaganda").
Oh I totally agree, a blanket ban on advertising isn’t remotely realistic, ever. It’s a silly idea, and I doubt what most people want. I’m just sayin’ the Central Hudson test makes commercial speech less protected than, say, political rants, and it could in theory be used to reduce protections, even if that’s not happening right now. Either way, banning ads and free speech protections are two somewhat separate issues, ads could be legal without having any free speech status.
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 mean, if you're going to make up your own First Amendment jurisprudence. But it would be worth reading the line of cases from Schneider through Sorrell (there's a lot of them) to get the reasoning of several generations of jurists on why it's not this simple.
Maybe you should post a proposal for a law that's a little more specific than "is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising." Then we can see if it is in fact possible to prevent 99%, or for that matter 50%, of the harm that comes from modern advertising, without outlawing other things.
Let's consider toomim's three examples: "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together," giving out free samples, and putting a sign up on your business that says the business name.
The first case seems like it would straightforwardly be illegal under your proposal if the waiter is an employee (or contractor) who gets paid by the restaurant, because the restaurant is exchanging money with the waiter in order to promote the rosé, which is a product. It would only be legal if the waiter were an unpaid volunteer or owned the restaurant.
The second case seems like it would straightforwardly be illegal under your proposal if the business had to buy the free samples from somewhere, knowing that it would give some of them out as free samples, because then it's exchanging money with its supplier in order to promote its products (in some cases the same product, but in other cases the bananas and soft drinks next to the cash registers, which people are likely to buy if you can get them into the store). Also, if one of the business's employees (or a contractor) gave out the free samples, that would be exchanging money with the employee to promote a product. You'd only be in the clear if you're a sole proprietor or partnership who bought the products without intending to give them away, changed your mind later, and then gave them away yourself rather than paying an employee to do so.
Putting up a sign on the business that says the business name is clearly promoting products, if the business sells products. Obviously the business can't pay a sign shop. If the business owner makes the sign herself, that might be legal, but not if she buys materials to make the sign from. She'd have to make the sign from materials unintentionally left over from legitimate non-advertising purchases, or which she obtained by non-purchase means, such as fishing them out of the garbage. However, she'd be in the clear if her business only sells services, not products.
A large blanket loophole in the law as you proposed it is that it completely exempts barter. So you can still buy a promotional sign from the sign shop if you pay the sign shop with something other than money, such as microwave ovens. The sign shop can then freely sell the microwave ovens for money.
In this form, it seems like your proposal would put at risk basically any purchase of goods by a product-selling business, except for barter, because there is a risk that those goods would be used for premeditated product promotion. Probably in practice businesses would keep using cash, which would give local authorities free rein to shut down any business they didn't like, while overlooking the criminal product-promotion conspiracies of their friends.
So, do you want to propose some legal language that is somewhat more narrowly tailored? Because a discussion entirely based on "I know it when I see it" vibes is completely worthless; everyone's vibes are different.
I think the language is OK, it’s just that you are consistently ignoring “in order to promote a product” clause.
The first case is legal because waiter gets paid by the restaurant to serve meals, not to promote the specific brand of rose wine. Only illegal if the waiter has another, secret contract with the wine manufacturer to “recommend” specific wine.
The other two cases are legal because the money exchanged in order to receive goods. The fact the goods are then used to promote something is irrelevant.
I wasn't ignoring it; I specifically criticized it in detail. Your interpretation does not seem defensible or even coherent, but maybe you could propose less ambiguous language that clearly lays out the interpretation you have in mind. That way we can evaluate its tradeoffs.
I’m confident from PoV of any judge, the waiter in question gets paid for serving meals.
Similarly, a man purchasing physical stuff is giving money in exchange for the goods as opposed to advertisement services. Classic contract of sale of physical goods, nothing even slightly ambiguous.
It’s the same with ordering a sign. “Exchanging money in order to promote a product” doesn’t happen because manufacturing the sign is not a promotion. To promote something using a sign, you would need to post the sign in a publicly visible place. Manufacturing a sign and giving it to your client in private doesn’t promote the product shown on the sign.
I'm not a lawyer, nor is it my job to come up with loophole-free regulation. People in those professions can think hard about this problem, and do a much better job than some layperson who thought about it for a few minutes on an internet forum. Even for them, though, coming up with laws without loopholes that are not too restrictive in legitimate situations is often impossible, so it's ridiculous that you would expect the same from me.
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.
Your addendum, "Only applies for companies, and only to those with more than $100,000 ARR," doesn't help at all; it still prohibits the three examples in most cases and still has the barter loophole.
If you can't figure out how to express what you want in such a way that it doesn't immediately collapse upon the most casual attempt at critical thought, the problem probably isn't that the population is brainwashed. It's probably that what you want is to eat your cake and still have it, a logical contradiction that could never exist in any possible world.
You seem to think that the law is something that can be delegated to the lawyers. But in fact the law balances conflicting interests. If you don't participate in defining it, your interests won't be taken into account. A law written by lawyers without outside input will only serve the lawyers' interests, not yours.
It's not the role of citizens to come up with regulation that protects them. It's not their role to protest or even acknowledge that they are being abused. It's the role of governments and law makers to ensure the safety of their citizens. This is literally what we elect and pay them to do.
If you can't see how the current system is harming not just individuals, but the stability of governments and our democratic processes, and the role of the advertising industry in all of this, then nothing I nor anyone else says can convince you otherwise.
You seem more interested in scrutinizing hastily put together arguments by laypeople on an internet forum, than acknowledging the issues put forth, and the fact that fixing this deeply rooted problem will require multi-faceted solutions over a very long period of time.
I agree that the current system is harmful in exactly the ways you describe, but I don't see you contributing anything towards solving those problems or even understanding what a solution would consist of. Instead you are criticizing policymakers for failing to satisfy your preferences even though you can't articulate them coherently yourself.
This:
> It's not the role of citizens to come up with regulation that protects them. It's not their role to protest or even acknowledge that they are being abused. It's the role of governments and law makers to ensure the safety of their citizens.
is not a description of the relationship between citizens and a democracy. It's a description of the relationship between subjects and a monarch or dictator—a relationship which invariably results in serious abuses of those subjects.
If you don't have a coherent idea of what you want, nobody can give it to you.
It’s not speech that needs to be regulated, it’s broadcast (which should not have 1A protections at nearly the same level). Even if a waiter is giving recommendations, those are limited to the people at the table and there is clearly a mutual exchange of value. Broadcast (aka Industrial) advertising is something we accept, but not because it particularly benefits the viewer. It benefits the broadcaster and advertiser and makes the viewer into a product.
And we already regulate actual broadcast on this basis.
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...
> 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.
Uh, what? You say there's no rule and then in the next sentence you talk about a rule.
I said that it violates no rule to include in program material valid tones that will spuriously trigger an ENDEC which receives them, and that it does violate a rule (specifically, a subsection of 47 CFR part 11 that I can't be bothered hunting down just now) to broadcast program material including such tones.
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.
How would this work for a personal blog? Would I need to be careful not to endorse or even talk about companies and products? And if I didn't have to, wouldn't that open the door for advertising masquerading as news or opinion? Genuinely interested in this.
Were you paid to talk about the product? If not, then it’s constitutionally protected speech. If there is any kind of payment, it’s advertising. If it’s advertising, follow the law.
If a company sends you a free sample in exchange for writing a review, and you get to keep it regardless of your conclusion, is that a payment? If so, that shuts down a way for consumers to get reviews of products before purchasing, but if not, the company might find various non-payment ways to influence what the reviewer writes.
Many lines are hard to draw but we benefit from trying to draw them. Worrying too much would be bikeshedding
The biggest example that comes to mind is gambling. Japan says it's not gambling if the pachinko place gives you balls and then you have to walk next door to a "different" company to cash out the balls. I say it sounds like their laws are captured by the pachinko industry.
Video game loot boxes are technically legal but most of us don't want children gambling. Even if the game company doesn't pay you for weapon skins, there's such a big secondary market that it constitutes gambling anyway. Just like the pachinko machines.
> I say it sounds like their laws are captured by the pachinko industry.
It wasn't just the pachinko industry that tied the hands of Japanese government. It was the people too. It's a lot harder to ban something and keep it banned when everybody wants it. Thankfully, not many people want ads, but pachinko was popular enough that it makes sense to continue to let people do it. You're right about still getting a benefit. Even after carving out exceptions, banning gambling broadly otherwise is effective enough to solve a lot of the problems that unregulated gambling can cause.
I do think video game loot boxes are something that needs regulation. Not just because it is gambling, but because the games can be unfair and even adversarial. Casinos exploit and encourage adult gambling addicts but at least those games are required to be "fair" (no outright cheating) and they have to be honest about how unfair the odds against you are. A supposedly impartial third party goes around making sure casinos are following the rules. Video games don't have any of that and they're targeting children on top of it.
The ambiguity of these questions is a feature rather than a bug.
Being unable to tell when something is "advertising" forces everyone to think twice before hawking their wares, which is exactly what we want if we intend to kill ads. The chilling effect is precisely the intention.
It’s the engineer’s curse to believe that airtight laws are automatically better, or that justice springs from mechanistic certainty. The world is fundamentally messy, and the sooner we accept its arbitrariness, the sooner we can get to an advertising-free world.
No. This is called selective enforcement and is the worst thing in the world. It gives the enforcers the option to pick on whoever they want and give a pass to whever they want, as if there were no law at all. There is effectively no law at all, because literally anyone doing anything can be called either guilty or innocent at the whim of the person doing the enforcing, or whoever controls them.
You've just described how laws actually work - but we have created modern judiciary system so that it will tend to produce outcomes considered fair by the majority. Algorithmic enforcement of justice without human deliberation of case-by-case specifics would be worse that the worst horror stories about soulless bureaucracies.
That's why we have judges and lawyers, so that the outcome can be decided as a communal process instead of just one person deciding what is punishable - even if the person is the developer building the automated justice dispenser and they'll be not around when the decision is taken, it would still be made by the whims of a single enforcer.
You've just observed the fact that even the least ambiguous and subjective language possible still requires interpretation, not that laws are meant to be ambiguous or subjective.
They literally said that the ambiguity is good because it keeps everyone on their toes because no one knows if they are safe. That's their own words not my invented re-interpretation.
"The ambiguity of these questions is a feature rather than a bug. Being unable to tell when something is "advertising" forces everyone to think twice..."
Courts performing the job of interpretation is indeed not the same as selective enforcement, but this comment expressly advocates for deliberate ambiguity. Not unavoidable ambiguity.
They obviously did not know they are asking for selective enforcement by that name, or why that is a bad thing, a far worse thing than the advertizing or whatever other bad behavior they imagine "forces everyone to think twice" curtails, but that is what ambiguity in a law gets you.
Let alone a whole other dimension to this, that it doesn't even curtail what they think.
They think they are attacking advertizers, but advertizers are fine under selective enforcement. Really they are only attacking themselves and all other little guy individuals. Google and Amazon and all other advertizers have the money and the connections at city hall to get their own behavior selectively allowed. It's only you and me and themselves who will ever have to "think twice".
And it goes on down from every slightly bigger fish vs every slightly smaller. The local used car dealer uglifying your neighborhood has more friends on the police force and at the mayors office than you do, so they get to do whatever, and you get to think twice.
This has not been an unknown matter of opinion or speculation since the dawn of writing. You are free to think otherwise, but it is only the freedom to be ignorant.
There would be a chilling effect on speech. People would be afraid to speak or be imprisoned for saying the wrong things. North Korea is the only country that bans advertising.
> North Korea is the only country that bans advertising.
Outright banning, yes maybe. But many countries or local governments severely regulate advertising in one form or another, and no one is crying foul either.
They didn't start out banning those ads. Those ads were banned because they were found to be more harmful than they are worth. We've come to realize that much of the ads we're subjected to these days are also harmful, so it's natural for us to want them banned as well.
Some of us actually go as far as ban billboards, electronic billboards, or even during elections - some counties in Germany limit all kinds of election related propaganda to a few large billboards at the entrance roads, and the rest is kept clean from the bullshit.
Can you point to an airtight law regarding speech that exists today - both as written and enforced? I can't.
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.
Sure, but I meant airtight as a point on a spectrum rather than absolute thing. Meaning: you should prefer laws which are both generic and unambiguous.
In the communications industry there are SOME fairly bright definitions:
- Advertising and marketing are when an entity pays some other entity to transmit content
- Public relations is when an entity, without paying, causes another entity to transmit content
- Public affairs is when an entity causes a governmental entity to consume specific content at minimum, up to possibly influencing decisions. It should go without saying that this is without paying as well, otherwise it's corruption/bribery
...an entity A pays some other entity B to transmit some specific content to a third party to induce the third party to take action that benefits the paying entity A.
If I enter your restaurant, car dealership, etc. then you can pitch & try to up-sell your goods and services to me.
If I drive down a motorway or use your website, third-parties can't advertise their goods and services at me from spots you've sold them. (But you can tell me it will be faster to exit onto your toll road or that I should buy or upgrade my membership plan on the site.)
So no third-party advertising. But that would then create bundling schemes where the restaurant sells you a bundle of their goods and some third-party goods together, for a kickback on the backend, or they make referrals.
No, that's why I said 'unsolicited' rather than 'third-party', so take the motorway billboard toll road example - if you also happen to own the car dealership or the webapp, you can't advertise that, because that's not what I've come to your motorway for.
And what's solicited or 'relevant' doesn't need to be rigidly defined in statutes (assuming common law) - the ASA or OfCom whoever it would be (UK examples) slaps fines on the rulebreakers and if they think they've interpreted the law correctly in good faith then it goes to court and we find out (and the growing body of case law helps future would-be-advertisers interpret it).
The existing advertisement disclosure rules for social media for example don't allow the loophole you propose: a 'sponsored' segment shilling a product in a YouTube video isn't considered different from directly selling video time to the third-party in which to run their own ad reel.
How can you be so certain the consumer experience would remain the same when the marketing incentives change entirely? They’re literally called super markets.
I would start with obvious things, like banning distracting blinking advertisement next to roads and go further from there.
Rule of thumb, all aggressive unwanted information.
Clear? For sure not, like you said. But I am considering (rather dreaming) moving to La Palma, a vulcano island that banned all light advertisement (they did so, because of the observatories on top, but they are cool).
Still, a city without aggressive lights would be nice. Some lights are probably unavaidable in big cities, but light that is purposeful distracting, should be just banned.
And online is kind of a different beast, as we voluntarily go to the sites offering us information (but thank god and gorhill for adblockers)
I think it is a good question, but there are some answers. For one thing, it is paid for, though a system set up for the purpose of putting commercial speech on someone else's profit making media.
Many laws do draw lines in areas that are equally difficult. Its a problem, but far from a fatal one.
So if a restaurant rents a property to build a really nice looking outdoor dining area, do they have to surround it with walls so people arent convinced by it to dine there?
There are two ways of trying to achieving goal. One is to start from big picture, think if we even want to do something, then plan how to go there. Second is to start from technicalities and probably immediately go nowhere.
You are starting from technicalities before you even took the moment to actually think of goal is worth it.
If it is worth it and we would indeed be better off - plan how to go there, it may not be easy, but it will be possible this way or another. If it is not worth it after all - just say it, no technicalities needed, redirect time and effort elsewhere.
If money exchanges hands. If you pay someone to distribute flyers, or you pay someone to run ads.
If you expect a this for that that benefits the giver. Like say a pharma offering free airfare and lodging to a medical conference if you talk up their product to patients.
There will be corner cases, obscure circumstances, unforeseen loopholes, etc., but this would be a good start.
Worth questioning who that benefits the most. It definitely benefits consumers in the sense that they won't be bombarded by advertisements.
But it also benefits large businesses that already spent millions advertising and now have a much deeper moat.
It kind of reminds me of college sports before NIL deals. Back then, you couldn't pay college recruits. You'd think this levels the playing field, right?
In fact, we saw the opposite effect. You see schools spending millions to add waterslides to their locker rooms, or promising "exposure" that smaller schools can't offer. You essentially had to spend twice as much on stuff that indirectly benefited the players.
I'd expect similar things to happen among businesses. Think "crazy stunt in Times Square so that an actual news site will write about it."
>What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together. Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed?
Were they paid by a vintner to say that?
>What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?
To and by whom? From Nvidia to a GPU reviewer: Yes; from a chocolate shop to a patron: No.
>What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?
Think for a moment about what kind of horrible totalitarian system you'd need to be living in for it to be able to jail a waiter just for making a product recommendation. Given the current US administration, how could anyone in their right mind think it's a good idea to give the government that kind of power?
Who said the punishment would be imprisonment? Fine the waiter $5 for every violation. Such a small fine will be orders of magnitude higher than what advertisers pay.
What happens if he doesn't pay the fine? He goes to jail. All laws are enforced with the threat of jail, otherwise nobody would follow them. So not only do you need an all-pervasive surveillance system to identify when a waiter tries to market something, but also a justice system with the power to jail him for doing so.
You’re right! Luckily everyone on HN works in the IT basement, so they can stay blissfully ignorant about how their company ever makes any money from the exquisite code they’re writing…
It raises the question, it does not beg it. Begging the question is e.g saying 'If advertisement was bad for you it would be forbidden. Since it's not forbidden it's not bad for us. Therefor we should not forbid it.'
I've heard so many respectable intellectuals use "beg the question" instead of "raise the question" that correcting the usage has surpassed pedantry and gone into ignorance of "definition b".
It's like correcting someone on the pronunciation of French-English forte. It just gets you uninvited next time.
Yet we have laws against fraud, rape, and so on. Where do you draw the line for those? There are some crystal clear cases, and there are unclear cases where you could argue forever.
So it is for advertising. You don't need to draw a clear line for every case before you can make a law.
I like how it turned out with email advertising, actually: spam is defined to be whatever people put into their spam folder.
In addition to sibling commenters mentioning incentive-side (eg. paid to promote) considerations, I also propose both an "immersion" and/or "consent" component.
When you are dining, and are suggested food pairings -- I'm there to eat, so suggesting something food related from the same establishment, that may enhance my meal experience, makes sense and generally does not feel unduly interruptive. In a way, I consent to being offered additional interesting and available food items at that time and place. I would not find it acceptable if the waiter brought out a catalog and tried to sell me shoes or insurance.
In a similar way, I don't mind (and often even enjoy or appreciate) movie trailers at the beginning of movies. I'm there to watch a movie, and in a fairly non-interruptive way (before the start of the movie) I am presented with some other movies coming out soon. Nice. I consent to seeing them at the start of a movie, and they are relevant to the subject matter. I would certainly be irritated if they were hoisted upon me in the middle of the movie, or if they were about new cars coming out soon.
I have also at times been actively searching for something I need or want to purchase, but am unsure what exactly I am looking for or what are the best options. At that time I would certainly be more open and interested in seeing advertisements regarding the types of items I am interested in. I would "consent" to seeing interest based advertisements.
Summary: I do not enjoy being interrupted with advertisements completely unrelated to whatever activity I am taking part in. I only want to see them when it is related to what I am doing, AND when I consent to seeing them.
What about just restrict it to advertising on the internet?
The internet is supposed to be an information retrieval tool. Advertising’s whole goal is to stand between you and the information you actually want. And it does so by trying to anticipate instead of the thing you want, the thing you are most willing to buy next, whether that’s actual products with money or propaganda. Whereas an ad in a magazine about computers offers me relevant ads for products about computers. And if you read old ad copy a lot of it is a serious effort to try and convince you to buy their product. From some kind of argument for it. Instead of simply using statistics and data to predict what you will buy next. So this required the product to actually deliver something to justify the effort to advertise it.
>What about just restrict it to advertising on the internet?
Why? I don't see the difference between a webpage and the magazine here, except that I guess you're assuming the webpage must be showing an unrelated ad.
Not all countries have the same free speech protections as America. I can easily imagine a country that simply has a bureaucracy whose approval is required to publish TV programming, or one that bans banner ads in social media, billboards, restricts shop signs in various ways, requires all packaging in the store to be black and white, etc. Advertising doesn’t have to ve banned outright. It could be killed by a thousand specific rules targeting the most obnoxious forms, provided there wasn’t a constitutional issue in the country implementing these measures.
The free samples are interesting. No one got mad because people offered cheese samples at the grocery store, because they're not forced to eat them. I dread passing by the perfume island when I go shopping because the vendors can be persistent, but IMO that is also not blatant advertising. Offering free samples of perfumes inside magazines also doesn't offend anyone, but that's clearly paid advertising and would be illegal.
This is precisely the sort of statement that derails the discussion and makes it impossible to even have. I imagine there’s a name for this sort of thing, perhaps some exquisitely long German word?
So lets do this: ban all ads in print, video, and in-public. Make the fine so high that you’re going to have to declare bankruptcy and close up shop. Or just straight up revoke corporate charters. There’s your line. I’m happy to start here and negotiate backwards. But this needs to be in effect while we work it out. Advertising is killing us. I don’t need or want myself or my family constantly assaulted by ads.
Finally, to be frank I find advertisements a sibling of propaganda. I don’t want either.
One man's propaganda is another man's truth-to-power.
There are dangerous consequences to handing the government the authority to ban public communication (even about mouthwash brands) without very careful scrutiny.
Imagine if you couldn't advertise energy alternatives because oil and gas came first and, with advertising banned, we can't even talk about the relative merits of installing solar vs. buying coal-made grid electricity. The status quo will maintain until the planet cooks.
There is a big difference between advertising and information. First, most people are generally not being paid by big energy alternatives to promote it. Of course we can talk about things. What we wouldn't be able is to be paid by someone to have a specific public discourse.
> There's a big difference between advertising and information
I recommend looking up the videos they made in the 1950s about how to use modern appliances, telephones, etc. and then noting that those videos were mostly paid for by the companies that manufactured those goods because they had a vested interest in people knowing how to use the tools so they would buy the tool.
> What we wouldn't be able is to be paid by someone to have a specific public discourse.
Widecast public communications always cost money. Always. Somebody is putting money forward to put a message on that billboard, or on that radio, or on that website. If we ban advertising but we aren't banning billboards, radio, and websites, we are tying off one category of communicator. Cynically, I would expect the result to not be an end to commercial advertising, but for more commercial advertising disguised as other things. I don't know that we would be able to disambiguate the two ideas, not in a world where, for example, public television programs are supported by the Sears Roebuck Corporation.
Those explication videos are product instructions. They can still be made available in the youtube channel of this brand (and for my bike, they were and I'm glad for them).
Yes youtube costs money to run. Selling your private data and attention shouldn't be an option.
So who should pay the bill? If you're the customer, that would be You, or no one if you consider that empty channel not to be worth it.
So you only get to see the bike tutorial if you have the money to pay for it. That widens the haves / have-nots gap; I'm not sure that's a desirable goal.
You don't need to draw a precise line, just one where things over the line are clearly undesirable, like billboards on roadways, TV commercials, etc. There are some countries with virtually no advertising. People who visit the DPRK come back saying it's like "Ad block for your life".
Corporate personhood exists so that you can be hired by a company instead of a specific person in HR or have a cellphone contract with Verizon instead of a particular sales associate and companies can buy real estate and so on without requiring a whole bunch of extra legal work defining all the ways in which corporations are legally treated like natural persons. That necessarily includes giving corporations some of the same rights and duties as natural persons. But I do think that corporations have been given too many rights which have been interpreted too broadly. The notion that a corporation has a constitutional right to spend however much money it wants to influence politics due to free speech is ridiculous.
> This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech?
That's a great question, but let's not lose sight of the fact that failing to legislate on this is 0% reliable. If we even are able to identify and ban 25% of advertising, that level of reliability is a massive improvement over doing nothing. Don't fall for the perfect solution fallacy.
The reality is that some really basic, careful definitions of advertising would identify a huge percentage of advertising, without catching any cases that aren't advertising.
As a starting point, if a corporation pays a person or corporation to display their corporation's name, product, or logo on a physical property, broadcast, or publication when they aren't directly selling your product, that's advertising. Maybe you can think of some cases where that catches some stuff it shouldn't, and I'm open to revising it.
> What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?
> What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?
I think this sort of handwringing is pretty silly. I don't care about either of those--I do care about "free samples" in the sense of auto-renewing free trials, but that's because the intent is to trick people into forgetting to cancel, not because it's advertising.
Draw the line very conservatively, making a very clear definition of advertising that we can agree on illegal, and go from there as we see the effects (i.e. what loopholes people start to use). Regulation is an iterative process--start small and build.
No paid advertising, whether that involves financial compensation, in kind gifts, or something else.
There would be no commercial ads online if google received no kickbacks to show ads. There would be no influencers, either. I'd be okay with non-profits and government agencies advertising benevolent things to us, like vaccinations.
The only hard part is to develop systems to actually ensure nobody is receiving compensation if they are showing a product.
I'd also be fine to make exceptions for internal advertising, e.g. you're already on the Google website and Google is advertising their own products/services to you.
Vaccine ads are a great example, in that large parts of the population consider them as fake propaganda. Trump supporters were up in arms against Biden/Dems for promoting vaccines during COVID. With your logic RFK Jr would be very happy!
There is no line, to fully and strictly ban advertising we basically have to abandon democracy and capitalism. Advertising and capitalism a so tightly related that you can't have one without the other.
You want no ads? Cool, let's familiarize yourself with North Korea.
People might want to rather opt for ethical ad standards and regulations, something fundamental like... GDPR.
That's why it's such a stupid idea. People who want a world without advertising should create a product that will genuinely improve people's lives and be forced to work as a salesman selling that product and experience the practicalities of doing so before drawing lines. I'm not for unsolicited phone calls about my car's warranty during dinner, but advertising is not this universal evil that some make it out to be.
There's a world of difference between announcing the existence of a product to potentially interested demographics, and abusing people's privacy by collecting their personal data in order to build a profile of them so they can be micro-targeted by psychologically manipulative content that is misleading or downright false—oh, and their profile is now in perpetuity exchanged in dark markets, and is also used by private and government agencies for spreading political propaganda, and for feeding them algorithmic content designed to keep them glued to their screens so that they can consume more ads that they have no interest in seeing... And so on, and so forth.
Whatever happened to product catalogs? Remember those? I'm interested in purchasing a new computer, so I buy the latest edition of Computer Shoppers Monthly. Companies buy ad space there, and I read them when I'm interested. The entire ecommerce industry could work like that. I go on Amazon, and I search for what I want to buy. I don't need algorithms to show me what I might like the most. Just allow me to search by product type, brand, and specifications, and I'm capable of making a decision. It would really help me if paid and promoted reviews weren't a thing, and I could only see honest reviews by people who actually purchased the product. This is a feature that ecommerce sites can offer, but have no incentive to.
The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed?
What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?
What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?
I hate advertising and propaganda. But the hard part IMO is drawing the line. Where's the line?