Any existing policy inevitably has a gray area, no matter how elaborate it is. That's okay if the author didn't cover corner cases in a short essay.
> You don't just magically know what to buy.
Knowing what you need is not magic. I don't remember much advertising lately that would tell me how a good can satisfy my existing needs. Mostly, they are trying to make me feel I need something I didn't need before
Hardly a corner case. It's such an obvious question that the failure to cover it means the author isn't serious.
Knowing what you need is not magic, but knowing which products might satisfy it is not automatic. Advertising targeting, which people quite reasonably find intrusive, exists because advertisers desperately want to find people who may potentially want to buy their product.
Of course it does, but this proposal entails banning search engines, right? I can imagine definitions of "advertising" that don't encompass search, but this author doesn't intend them; he explicitly states that he is not just classifying "paid" advertising of products as advertising but all "third-party" advertising, "full stop", and acknowledges this would make Google "cease to exist" in its "current form". He clearly intends his proposal to include banning search engines, entirely.
Any existing policy inevitably has a gray area, no matter how elaborate it is. That's okay if the author didn't cover corner cases in a short essay.
> You don't just magically know what to buy.
Knowing what you need is not magic. I don't remember much advertising lately that would tell me how a good can satisfy my existing needs. Mostly, they are trying to make me feel I need something I didn't need before