> you are actually preventing people from doing something that is important and valuable to them.

There are many things individuals will consider "important and valuable to them" that are harmful to others. We prevent individuals from harming others for their own self-gain because that's what societies do.

This is an argument against people having rights at all. "Oh, you think you're entitled to X? Well, in certain scenarios, X might cause harm. You might use free speech to advocate for something bad, or leverage your immunity to unjust search & seizure to conceal evidence of a crime."

Consider that the author considers propaganda to be a form of advertising, and suggests we ban propaganda. Well, Fox News is is probably one of the most influential sources of propaganda in our era, and they're just publishing news with a strong political slant. This anti-propaganda law effectively would have to make it illegal to publish political opinion pieces. That would be absurdly draconian.

For the record, I'm strongly anti-advertising, but a complete ban on advertisement would be impossible to construct because you can't draw a sharp line between ads and free expression.

> Well, Fox News is is probably one of the most influential sources of propaganda in our era, and they're just publishing news with a strong political slant.

Actually (and hilariously) Fox News according to their own court filings do not publish news, they are an entertainment product.

And I say ironically because that's exactly the mechanism people are clamoring for in this discussion: it's the courts. Lawyers argue and courts eventually decide definitions all the time, because it's highly impractical to belabor and endlessly debate passing new laws because we don't have ironclad definitions in them beforehand.

If you want my humble opinion, in a legal/ban sense, I would define advertising as:

> Communicative material that is placed strategically by publishers or media for a price/by way of other agreement to drive awareness of products or services with the intent to generate attention and sales of said products or services.

Kudos for providing a somewhat sensible definition. This helps by addressing the free speech issues (at least to an extent^[1]), but I think there are other problems as well.

The economical fallout would be extensive. Google's and Meta's business model (and that of many others) would basically disappear overnight. While I'm not a fan of either, and think there should be much stricter regulation for (very large) tech-companies, this would make financing of a lot of important products infeasible. But not just in tech. Think about product placement in movies or television, banners in big sporting events etc. Who'd pay for that? The state? With whose money?

Also, it would make entering markets much harder, if you're not a household name already. If I read your definition correctly, you couldn't even give a complimentary account for your SaaS product to a reviewer ("by way of other agreement") to enable them to test your software (and hopefully write favorably about it if they're convinced). This would definitely hurt consumers.

I think you should be allowed to try to change minds. If anything, we should outlaw the massive tracking effort involved in advertising.

[1]: What about a political party publishing a newspaper and paying their staff? Is that okay? I could construct more examples, and life is even messier. On the other hand, I have to admit, that the focus on the payment aspect makes this much more palatable to me.

> The economical fallout would be extensive.

There was likely economic fallout many would call extensive when we mandated equal wages for minorities and an end to child labor, and yet businesses soldier on. Turns out, if you’re selling products people need, momentary disruptions and changing market conditions generally don’t mean you suddenly cannot conduct business.

> Think about product placement in movies or television, banners in big sporting events etc. Who'd pay for that? The state? With whose money?

One of sport fans biggest complaints is the overwhelming number of ads and the overbearing, bloated organizations behind pro tier sports. It seems like bankrupting a lot of them and letting teams return to public goods funded by municipalities would be a huge step forward into preserving sports as a social event, not a profit seeking venture.

And it’s not like pro sports aren’t already benefitting from taxpayers left and right. We could just get rid of the money men up top and let things settle where they may. Sure we may not get blockbuster sports events anymore, but maybe more people could then afford to actually attend?

> This would definitely hurt consumers.

Consumers LOATHE SaaS. They would cheer for it to be killed off.

> What about a political party publishing a newspaper and paying their staff?

I don’t see how that would run afoul of my definition?

> The economical fallout would be extensive.

So is the fallout from Trump's new tariffs, yet they still got done.

I don't think the government cares about economic fallout unless it affects billionaires, so you're right, advertising will never be banned because it would cut into the profits of the president's richest and most vocal supporters.

> As another example, Good Mythical Morning and other YouTube shows frequently do product comparisons / tests. That clearly isn't advertising, unless the companies who make those product are sponsoring them.

Did the pay full retail price for the product or get a discount?

Did they get the product at release or in advance?

Did they get access to detailed specs or the people who built it?

Did they give feedback that went into the product?

Did they get a company/lab/event visit and some swag?

Did they get preferential access for the next product?

"Sponsoring" is just the most visible, clearly disclosed way to advertise in those. But fundamentally, getting and preserving access is immensely valuable and there may not be funds moving between the two groups.

None of us are completely unbiased. Getting those things disclosed would be a great improvement.

This is just benevolent authoritarianism (the most common form of government worldwide and historically).

This law is no different than any other prohibition. It's not like we have to go back to the legal lab to figure out precisely what advertising is because, unlike things with clear definitions everyone knows like fraud, discrimination, or defamation, advertising is particularly nebulous.

Did you see which comment this is in reply to? It’s about your general description of people in tech to be hesitant and skeptical when it comes to banning things.

I'm confused by your comment, the posts are both mine? Even if I take what I think is the most charitable version of your "argument", which I think is "tech thinks things should by default exist and be permissible unless they pass an extremely stringent test", no pro-advertising person here is trying to find the outlines of what that test might be. They're all running right to "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization", which is absurd.

> "We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is

You are describing the ability of good engineers to deal with vague and ill defined problems.

> "We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway..

Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.

> It's so transparent to me now

Hope I cleared up the confusion.

> "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization"

I am not - and did not make the claim. I am explaining why you are seeing engineers care more about vagueness in one context than another.

I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.

I don't claim to know the answer here, but I hope you can see some irony in saying:

> As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.

When the thing up for discussion is the hacking of our psyche to impose a will - ads - onto others, at a scale and persistence hereto unimaginable by the worst tyrants in history.

Someone with your eye for detail would probably be embarrassed to learn that while their entire argument rests on me referring to "engineers" I never wrote the word once.

It seems like you're one of those HN people who thinks they'll convince people scrolling by with petty semantic arguments and snark. Maybe that's true! But it doesn't work on me. For example, if you're gonna make a claim like "I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation", I'd want to see evidence that deals with the fact that the courts have come up with their own standards for their own review (rational basis, strict scrutiny) and indeed have formulated their own standards for evaluating legislation entirely on their own (undue burden, imminent lawless action, etc). From your comments in this thread, I'd guess you don't know anything about laws, legislation, judicial review, and the like. But hey, don't let that stop you from warning about the dangers of "destructive power of imposing your will on others".

> Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.

> […]

> I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.

Very well said across the board.

My stance is that any time—literally any time—someone is proposing and/or promoting a policy that can stifle, chill, and/or suppress free speech in any way, even if indirectly, the bar for justifying such a policy must necessarily be extremely high.

In theory, I actually agree with many of the arguments against advertising, but there’s a clear slippery slope with this “let’s ban advertising” line of thinking, so yes, the bare minimum is being able to concretely define what advertising even is in such a context.

Not for nothing, but slippery slope reasoning is a well-known fallacy and more or less an argument against all laws ("first they told me I couldn't kill anyone, now I can't hit anyone, now I can't talk about hitting anyone, now I can't write a story about hitting anyone or think about hitting anyone, murder laws are fascism"). The process of creating laws is about balancing rights, in this case your ability to advertise vs. your ability to be free from advertising and whatever its effects might be. The whole "banning advertising is impossible" argument (in fairness this basically the topic verbatim) is a lot less interesting than trying to find the principle or test where we can say, "this advertising seems useful to humanity" vs. "this advertising seems harmful to humanity". There's very little of the latter happening in this thread, which I think says it all.

Logical fallacies aren't automatic falsehoods. They're things that can't be proven with formal logic.

The slippery slope is a fallacy and also a thing that fairly consistently happens in politics and law.

The point far up this thread, however, was that this proposal isn't a slippery slope. It's a leaky sieve. If there is a law against speech that covers enough cases to be even slightly effective against people with lawyers, and I am powerful and don't like you, then you are going to prison.

There are no laws that will constrain a regime defined by its lawbreaking. Your argument applies to all laws.