Well, I agree that for the most part consumers try to minimize their exposure to advertising, but not always. Some extreme examples of commercial advertising that was or is highly sought after by its target audience include eBay listings, Craigslist posts, the Yellow Pages, classified ads, the Sears catalog, job offer postings, the McMaster–Carr catalog, Computer Shopper before the internet was widely accessible, and "product reviews" by reviewers who got the product for free. So it seems likely that there would, in fact, be "ad speakeasies".

But let's consider the other side of this:

> I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to [...] enforce

Suppose we consider the narrowest sort of thing we'd get the most benefit out of prohibiting, like memecoin pump-and-dump scams, which are wildly profitable for the promoters but provide no benefit at all to the buyers, so nobody goes looking for. We can get a preview of what that prohibition would look like by looking at the current state of affairs, because those are already illegal.

And what we see are fake Elon Musk live streams with deepfaked mouth movements, fake Elon Musk Twitter accounts that reply to his followers, prominent influencers like Javier Milei for no apparent reason touting memecoins they claim to have no stake in themselves, prominent influencers like Donald Trump touting memecoins they openly have stakes in, etc. I haven't heard about any memecoins making ostensibly unpaid product placement appearances in novels or Hollywood movies (probably crime thrillers) but it wouldn't surprise me.

How about sports stars? Today it's assumed that if a sportsball player is wearing a corporate logo, it's because the company is paying him to wear it. Suppose this were prohibited; players would have to remove or cover up the Nike logos on their shoes. Probably fans would still want to know which brand of shoes they were wearing, wouldn't they? Sports journalists would publish investigative journalism showing that one or another player wore Nike Airs, drank Gatorade, or used Titleist golf balls, and the fans would lap it up. How could you prove Titleist didn't give the players any consideration in return?

A lot of YouTubers now accept donations of arbitrary size from pseudonymous donors, often via Patreon. In this brave new world they would obviously be prohibited from listing the donors' pseudonyms, but what if Apple were to pseudonymously donate large amounts to YouTubers who reviewed Apple products favorably? The donees wouldn't know their income stream depended on Apple, but viewers would still prefer to watch the better-funded channels who used better cameras, paid professional video editors, used more informative test equipment, and had professional audio dubs into their native language. Which would, apparently quite organically, be the ones that most strongly favored Apple. Would you prohibit pseudonymous donations to influencers?

Commercial advertising is in fact prohibited at Burning Man, which is more or less viable because commerce is prohibited there. You have to cover up the logos on your rental trucks, though nobody is imprisoned or fined for violating this, and it isn't enforced to the extent of concealing hood ornaments and sneaker logos. But one year there was a huge advertising scandal, where one of the biggest art projects that year, Uchronia ("the Belgian Waffle") was revealed after the fact to be a promotional construction for a Belgian company that builds such structures commercially. (I'm sure there have been many such controversies more recently, but I haven't been able to attend for several years, so I don't know about them.)

Let's consider a negative-space case as well: Yelp notoriously removed negative reviews from businesses' listings if they signed up for its service. We can imagine arbitrarily subtle ways of achieving such effects, such as YouTube suggesting less often that users watch a certain video if it criticizes Google or a YouTube supporter (such as the US government) or if it speaks favorably of a competing service. How do you prohibit that kind of advertising in an enforceable way? Do you prohibit Yelp from removing reviews from the site?

Hopefully this clarifies some of the potential difficulties with enforcing a ban on advertising, even to people who don't want to be advertised to.

> Some extreme examples of commercial advertising that was or is highly sought after by its target audience include eBay listings, Craigslist posts, the Yellow Pages, classified ads, the Sears catalog, job offer postings, the McMaster–Carr catalog,

Listings that consumers actively seek are quite different from messages and content that companies try to place in front of people who haven’t asked for them.

It would seem both easy and reasonable to craft a law that bans advertising without banning listings of products and companies, product search engines, etc.

> How do you prohibit that kind of advertising in an enforceable way?

This seems similar to suggesting we shouldn’t ban e.g. price fixing or insider trading because they can be hard to detect and enforce.

That’s a fallacy. Most companies do not want to break the rules and risk enforcement (especially if the penalties are high), and a significant reduction and increase in subtlety of advertising would still be valuable.

> It would seem both easy and reasonable to craft a law that bans advertising without banning listings of products and companies, product search engines, etc.

I can't help noticing that you haven't ventured to attempt it in your comment. Why not?

> Most companies do not want to break the rules

This line makes me wonder if you have ever worked for a company. This is occasionally true of some rule, but only when it's the companies that break the rules that go out of business. In environments where the only survivors are the ones that break the rules, eventually most of the remaining companies do want to break the rules. Since enforcement is never perfect, in competitive markets, most companies want to break the rules just slightly: enough to compete effectively but not enough that enforcement makes them unprofitable.

Any law would need enforcement but also a mechanism to punish not only the creator of the ad but the distributor as well.

It isn't that we couldn't get rid of memecoin ads, but rather that twitter simply doesn't have almost any incentive to crack down on and prevent these sorts of ads. Attach a fine with some grace period and I can guarantee you'll end up with twitter looking into ways to block spammers to avoid being penalized.

I also don't personally mind shill reviewers mainly because they are often exposed anyways and become easy to ignore. Doesn't mean you couldn't enforce an ad ban still, but it might only catch the bigger names.

I'd also posit, though, that ad mediums would be far more effective. For example, banning commercials in videos would be and easy enough law to craft and enforce that would make video sites a lot more pleasant to visit.

A ban wouldn't need to be perfect to be very effective at making things better.

That has less to do with it being hard to craft bribery laws and more to do with the fact that the current bribery laws are entirely ineffectual. It's absolutely something that could be fixed, but certainly not something almost any politician would want to fix.

I will grant that companies would lobby hard against an anti-advertising bill (which means it'll likely never pass). That doesn't mean you couldn't make one that's pretty effective.

But, again, the nature of advertising makes it quite easy to outlaw. Unlike bribery, where a congress person can shove gold bars into their suit jackets in secret, advertising has to be seen by a lot of people to be effective. Making it something that has to be done in secret will immediately make it harder to do. The best you'll likely see is preferential placement of goods in stores or maybe some branding in a TV show.

There has probably never been a human society in history or prehistory without bribery, and no possible set of bribery laws could conceivably create one. This is a property of human nature, not the current set of laws in one country.

I think the same is probably almost true of advertising, though maybe societies without money such as Tawantinsuyu are an exception. But I don't think you can have merchants without advertising, because, like fraud, advertising is so profitable for merchants that they will do some of it despite whatever laws you have.

I agree. I also think this is a false dilemma.

Just because some corruption always will exist, doesn't mean that there aren't societies which have enforced laws that are more or less effective.

This binary thinking doesn't need to happen in a policy discussion. We don't need a perfect set of laws or rules to make things better. We don't avoid having a law just because someone will violate it. For example, a speed limit is still valid to have even though most people will break it, some egregiously so. DUIs laws are useful even though people still drink and drive.

It just so happens that with advertising we can be particularly effective at curbing the worst offenders. That's because advertising is most effective when it's seen by the largest number of people. I don't really care if a company tries to skirt an anti-ad law by paying an influencer millions to wear their product, so long I'm not forced to watch 20 minutes of ads in a 20 minute video. An anti-ad law would force advertisers to be subversive which is, frankly, fine by me. Subversive ads simply can't be intrusive.

You argument sounds a bit like "crime exists despite laws against them also existing, therefore we should not have such laws".

What you seem to be missing is that, in the end, it's all about risks vs. potential gains.

As it stands, advertising is relatively cheap and the only risk is to lose all the money spent on it.

Once it's made illegal, that formula changes massively since now there's a much bigger risk in the form of whatever the law determines - fines, perhaps losing a professional license or the right to work on a certain field, or to found and/or direct a company, perhaps even jail time!

You're right, it will probably still exist in some ways in some contexts. I bet it wouldn't be nearly as pervasive as it is today though, and that's a win. And if it's not enough, up the stakes.

I wasn't saying we shouldn't have such laws. I was saying that we should consider the possible enactment of such laws in the light of the knowledge that people will try to circumvent them and will sometimes succeed, rather than assuming that, if advertising is prohibited, there will be no advertising. You seem to agree with this, which means you disagree with the original article, which does make that assumption.

Separately, I was saying that we can't usefully debate the pros and cons of such a vague proposal. You can postulate that some sort of vaguely defined prohibition would have no drawbacks, but any concrete policy proposal will in fact have drawbacks, and in some cases those will outweigh their advantages.

Ok, in this case we do seem to be in broad agreement. I'm unclear of the value of your ideas though.

> I was saying that we should consider the possible enactment of such laws in the light of the knowledge that people will try to circumvent them and will sometimes succeed

That should always be the case when discussing any laws. If you don't consider that people will try to circumvent them, there is no point in considering punishment for when they do, and ultimately there is no point to the law.

> rather than assuming that, if advertising is prohibited, there will be no advertising.

As above, I would expect no one to make such assumptions.

> Separately, I was saying that we can't usefully debate the pros and cons of such a vague proposal.

I don't see why not. I suspect most proposals and ideas start vague, and by discussing their pros and cons and further refining them, we get to more concrete, more actionable ones.

> but any concrete policy proposal will in fact have drawbacks, and in some cases those will outweigh their advantages.

This is a truism, I'm not sure what value it adds to the discussion.

Murder is illegal, but still happens. Therefore, by your logic, we should legalize murder.

No, but when discussing laws against murder, we should not assume that they would eliminate murder. This article does assume that laws against advertising would eliminate advertising.