I.e displaying an ads about Sentry on a ads technica page, find . Displaying an ads about hiking equipment on ars techbica because i made a google search abd it is estimated I like that -> not fine. It would kill all the incentive to overtrack the ROI will no more justify the cost.
Those of us who dislike these practices already have a choice. We can simply not use the service. So why remove that choice from others who don't mind ads and are willing to use the free version?
Also, forcing a paid only model raises the barrier to entry. Most of the world lives on less than $10 a day, so a subscription would effectively limit access to relatively wealthy people by global standards.
OTOH I gladly pay for YouTube Premium.
The thing that changed in the mid-2000s was that we found ways to not only provide these services, but extract billions of dollars while doing it. Good for Mark Zuckerberg, but I doubt the internet would be hurting without that.
Now fucking everything about the world is a hustle to monetize every possible nook and cranny around content. There isn't even content anymore, it's nearly all AI slop as a substrate to grow ads on.
I am nostalgic for the era when I found "punch the monkey" irritating. People used to make websites as a labor of love.
My comment about not having a right to business models is in some ways more general. Regardless of whether this business model is protected for some other reason, business models in general aren't, and it's a common flawed argument that they are.
Its been 30 years and no one has been able to continue that "etc".
In practice, this cuts of 80% of the worlds population.
Catering to the lowest common denominator is how we got the Burger King guy on spirit airlines.
I have and do pay for website access. That doesn't mean much if the current model flocks to no paid services.
Say a a kid started throwing tantrums at school. By not punishing/ removing him you restrict the freedom of everyone else.
Fuck ads. What's absurd is tolerating them and the damage they do to media, consumers, kids, lesser and/or more honest businesses, culture, products, and so on all the way to the Windows and macOS system UIs.
At the same time, this has the same energy of "if we release all the files, the system will collapse". Maybe we need the billionaires to feel some pain sometimes (even if yes, we'll feel more overall).
Ads are speech.
No, they are not.
People have been brainwashed and legal systems have been paid and bought for to consider them as such, just like corporations have been whitewashed to be treated as "persons".
In any case, we regulate all other kinds of speech as well: explicit content, libel, classified information, cigarette ads, and so on.
I don’t think you need to count companies being able to put any message out there as free speech.
Granted, that's proven to be a horrible concept. So let's repeal that.
Five dollars a month to subscribe or whatever. If people get the value out of it, you can get them to pay it.
Maybe it could be good again, but not on the path it's on.
[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
If you try to regulate this, everything will be an ad in disguise.
In my opinion, that's the direction we are heading towards with AI anyway.
I'm surprised we haven't seen an instance of 'pay to increase bias towards my product in training' yet.
Require that every user must be shown the exact same ads (probabilistically). Don't allow any kind of interest or demographic based targeting for paid content.
Advertisers would still be able to place Ads on pages they know there target audience goes, but wouldn't be able to make those same Ads follow that target audience around the internet.
Interestingly, there are autocratic governments who do try to ban vague things. The goal there is selective enforcement, not good public policy.
You don’t need to go too far down the rabbit hole. You need to introduce friction to ads.
Subscription revenues are tiny when compared ad revenue, so I expect people will resist this idea ferociously.
Using an ad-blocker gets rid of most visible ads online, but there's still paid content in various forms which may be more effective than straight adverts anyway.
Today, on June 1st 2030, I'd like to announce the launch of the fediverse cooperative, the first cooperative social media platform.
We pay out all our membership fees (minus hosting costs) to our entire cooperative.
To use our servers, you'll obviously have to become member of our cooperative, paying $100 a month in membership fees, and earning $99.50 a month in dividends.
But we can build a culture that knows how to avoid ads and the technology to enable it.
If you remove the ability for these people to advertise there goes their livelihood. I understand the desire to want to punish big evil corporations but all this will do is strengthen them because they're the ones who have enough capital to survive something like this and scoop up the marketshare left behind by the millions of small businesses that will fail when this is implemented.
The product is the same as the speech, whereas in advertising the speech is in sycophantic service of another product.
That won't convince anyone.
We can have word of mouth, genuine, in forums and social media.
We can have reviews, genuine, in websites.
We can have websites which present new products and business, not as paid sponsorships.
We can search on our own initiative and go to their website.
We can have online catalogs.
And tons of other ways.
Making global business harder and forcing things more local actually sounds like a great benefit.
We could use less 1T companies and more a few billion or 100s of millions level companies too. I miss the "focused on Mac and iPod" era Apple.
The follow industry conventions, visit registries of industry websites, have professional lists where companies submit their announcements (and not to the general public) and so on.
>Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.
If advertising is banned, it will work just as good as for any competitor.
Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs. When people learn that their neighbors are paying less they will be naturally incentivized to investigate why. Equivalent problems can be solved with the same general technique.
Now all of the "brought to you by America's <industry group>" ads are back in. So is every pharma ad and every other patented product because they don't have to tell you a brand when there is only one producer.
> The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs.
Publication where? In the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"? Also, who decides to publish it, decides what it will say or pays the costs of writing and distributing it?
No, but they can convince a disinterested party that people aren't aware of <fact about industry that industry wants people to know> because that's actually true.
> Minimum competition requirements can be imposed.
But that brings back the original problem. Company invents new patented invention, how does anybody find out about it?
> a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.
This is the legislator's fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this.
If a proposal is full of problems and holes, the alternative isn't necessarily to do nothing, but rather to find a different approach to the problem.
Proposals that are full of holes are often worse than nothing, because the costs are evaluated in comparison to the ostensible benefit, but then in practice you get only a fraction of the benefit because of the holes. And then people say "well a little is better than nothing" while not accounting for the fact that weighing all of the costs against only a fraction of the benefit has left you underwater.
But I acknowledge that there may be edge cases. My point is that the existence of edge cases does not mean we should permit the harm to continue. Those specific edge cases can be identified and patched. My suggestion is a hypothetical example of a potential such patch, one that might possibly be a net benefit. Maybe it would actually be a net harm, and the restriction should be absolute. The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.
Your objections to this hypothetical example are nit-picking the edge cases of an edge case. They're so insignificant in comparison to the potential harm reduction of preventing advertising that they can be safely ignored.
The same legit things that can cause them to realize it today. Word of mouth, a product review, a personal search that landed them on a new company website, a curated catalog (as long as those things are not selling their placements).
An ad is the worse thing to find such things out - the huge majority ranges from misleading to criminally misleading to bullshit.
Many don't think businesses should exist in the first place.
but you can help this by banning all forms of active tracking.
Static ads only, no click tracking, and complete ban on profiling clients and especially on adjusting prices based on client/possible client behavior patterns.
Websites can too.
If you know the kind of articles your readers like, you can find ads that your readers will like.
Pervasive surveillance to make a system that's practically worse than the alternative that doesn't require mass surveillance, and is much simpler and cheaper. Did I say amusing before? Depressing is probably a better fit.
To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in technical legal disputes and still hasn't happened, despite the 2009 Lisbon Treaty mandating it.
The US First Amendment has no exceptions as worded, but the US Supreme Court has read some into it. The Convention has exceptions listed in the text, although they are vaguely defined – but like the US, the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive case law on the scope of those exceptions.
The big difference in practice is the US exceptions end up being significantly more narrow than those in Europe. However, given in both, the details of the exceptions are in case law – courts can and do change their mind, so this difference could potentially change (either by narrowing or broadening) in the decades to come.
> "Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
In the 2015 case Perinçek v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights applied Article 10 to find against a Swiss law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Can you imagine a Soviet court ever striking down a genocide denial law?
The decision is controversial because it introduces a double standard into the Court's case law – it had previously upheld laws criminalising Holocaust denial, now it sought to distinguish the Holocaust from the Armenian genocide in a way many find arbitrary and distasteful – the consistent thing would be to either allow denying both or disallow denying both.
But still, it just shows how mistaken your Soviet comparison is.
The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market power over the distribution channel so that you're paying them a premium over competing distributors. But then wouldn't the best way to prevent them from extracting that premium to be to make it so nobody has exclusive control over distribution channels, e.g. by breaking up concentrated markets or requiring federated protocols?
That's a different model than paying a technical writer to do technical writing.
But now how are you distributing either of them?
Yes. You self host it as a company, and it can only be reproduced (if they wish) in outlets (say review sites) when there's no payment or compensation of any kind involved for that.
You have your own website and your copy on it. Don't start that "but if you pay some hosting provider to host that website that would be advertising", or the
"And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that."
that borders on being obtuse on purpose.
Yes. You're still allowed to pay someone - for YOUR OWN corporate website. Still your copy is not on my fucking social media, news websites, forums, tv programming, and so on.
>and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen.
They can go into the hosting business all they want. If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law. What they host should only be accessible when somebody consciously navigates to it in some hierarchical scheme or directly enters the address/handle.
They're already hosting everything in your feed, and if there were actually no ads then everyone on the site would be paying them to do it, at which point what do you expect to be in your feed?
In any case it's trivial to come up with such a definition that covers most cases. Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. Laws can be supplemented and ammended.
We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it.
> We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective. I'd take a relative improvement even if it's not 100% over free reign.
>You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
I don't consider it a "hopeless disaster" (except in it's effects on society). As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations. The existence of dark illegal versions of it, or exploitation in the industry, doesn't negate this.
For the most part they're trash. There is a narrow range of effectiveness where the cost of compliance is low and thereby can be exceeded by the expected cost of reasonable penalties imposed at something significantly less than 100% effective enforcement, e.g. essentially all gas stations stopped selling leaded gasoline because unleaded gasoline isn't that much more expensive.
The cost of complying with a ban on advertising is high, so the amount of effort that will be put into bypassing it will be high, which is the situation where that doesn't work.
> As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations.
It essentially bifurcated content creation and distribution into "this is 100% porn" and "this company will not produce or carry anything that would cause it to have to comply with those rules" which inhibits quality for anything that has to go in the "porn" box and pressures anything in the "not porn" box to be sufficiently nerfed that they don't have to hire more lawyers.
The combination of "most human communication now happens via social media" and "expressing your own sexuality is effectively banned on most major social media platforms" is probably a significant contributor to the fact that people are having less sex now and the fertility rate is continuing to decline. "All the boobs you could ever possibly look at but only on the sites where there is no one you will ever marry" is not a super great way to split up the internet.
The ambiguity in the definition frequently causes people to be harassed or subject to legal risk when doing sex education, anatomy, etc. when they're trying to operate openly with a physical presence in a relevant jurisdiction. Conversely, it's the internet and it's global so every terrible thing you'd want to protect anyone from is all still out there and most of the rules are imposing useless costs for no benefits, or worse, causing things to end up in places where there are no rules, not even the ones that have nothing to do with sex.
It's now being used as an guise to extract ID from everyone for surveillance purposes.
It's a solid example of bad regulations setting fire to the omnishambles.
Conflating advertising with free speech is like conflating sex work with reproductive rights.
If they just banned infinite scrolling someone would come up with something equivalent that works slightly differently. Now they need a whole new law. It’s just constant whack-a-mole.
So instead they seem to ban goals. Your thing accomplishes that goal? It’s banned.
It’s a pretty different way than how we seem to do things in the US. But I can see upsides.
You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity.
At the core of the first amendment is the idea that people should not be punished for criticizing their government. I think that idea is worth preserving. But the idea that people are free to say anything they choose, in any context, regardless of its factual status, and also that their permission to do so is limited only by the resources they can muster to promulgate their speech, is an unwarranted extension of that concept.
The cold hard reality is that no matter how much you trust the people in the government today, eventually they will be replaced by people you consider to be the scum of the earth. And when that day comes, you will curse the day you allowed the government to punish speech, because you'll see speech you consider perfectly justified become illegal.
Make a lot of noise about privacy, force massive spend in the general direction of the EU, fund a new layer of bureaucracy, and actually do nothing to harm the toxic business models that were nominally the impetus for all this. Because someone’s gotta pay for all this new “privacy” infrastructure…
In a sense, I'm just agreeing with a fellow comment in the vicinity of this thread that said GDPR is already the EU's shot at banning (targeted) ads---it's just implemented piss-poorly. Personally formulated, my sentiment is that GDPR as it stands today is a step in the right direction towards scaling back advertisement overreach but we have a long way to go still.
Ofc it's impossible to blanket ban targeted ads because at best you end up in a philosophical argument about what counts as "targeting", at worse you either (a) indiscriminately kill a whole industry with a lot of collateral casualties or (b) just make internet advertising even worse for all of us.
My position here is that ads can be fine if they
1. are even somewhat relevant to me.
2. didn't harvest user data to target me.
3. are not annoyingly placed.
4. are not malware vectors/do not hijack your experience with dark patterns when you do click them.
To be super clear on the kind of guy talking from his soapbox here: I only browse YT on a browser with ad blockers but I don't mind sponsor segments in the videos I watch. They're a small annoyance but IMO trying to skip them is already a bigger annoyance hence why I don't even bother at all. That said, I've never converted from eyeball to even customer from sponsor segments.
I'd call this the "pre-algorithmic" advertising approach. It's how your eyeballs crossed ads in the 90s and IMO if we can impose this approach/model in the internet, then we can strike a good balance of having corporations make money off the internet and keeping the internet healthy.
I want to be able to browse the internet for free, where the sites have a sustainable business model and can therefore make high-quality content, but I don't want to have to sign up to a subscription for everything.
I want to be able to host websites that get lots of views, but I don't want that popularity to cost me.
Can someone please come up with something that solves all of these dilemmas for me?
Let's be clear what we mean by "evil". My time is valuable. I have a finite number of heartbeats before I die. If I have to spend 30 seconds watching a damn soap commercial before I get to watch a Twitch stream, that's 36 heartbeats I will never get back. Sure, I could press mute and do something else for 30 seconds that seems more valuable, but that doesn't fit my schedule. Stealing heartbeats is evil.
I have so far optimized against wasting my heartbeats by paying subscriptions to remove ads. Spotify, Twitch, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and a bunch of others I'm forgetting. Because it's worth $150/month or whatever to not waste my time with the most boring, uninteresting, irrelevant, nauseating crap that advertisers come up with.
And thank science for SponsorBlock, because sponsored segments in videos are the devil. Sponsored segments use the old non-tracking advertisement model. They pay publishers practically nothing because they aren't paying for conversions, but for an estimate based on impressions and track record woo. Bad for publishers, bad for advertisers, and bad for content consumers. Everybody loses. I'm well over my lifetime quota of BS from VPNs, MOBAs, and plots of land scams. So many heartbeats lost.
I’m totally fine with outlining targeted advertising. But even classic broadcast stuff poses the dilemma for me.
I have absolutely noticed I miss out some. As an easy example I don’t tend to know about new TV shows or movies that I might like the way I used to. There’s never that serendipity where you were watching the show and all of a sudden a trailer from a movie comes on and you say “What is THAT? I’ve got to see that.”
Maybe some restaurant I like is moving into the area. Maybe some product I used to like is now back on the market. It really can be useful.
Sure the information is still out there and I could seek it out, but I don’t.
On the other hand I do not miss being assaulted with pharmaceutical ads, scam products, junk food ads, whatever the latest McDonald’s toy is, my local car dealerships yelling at me, and so much other trash.
I’ve never figured out how someone could draw a line to allow the useful parts of advertising without the bad parts.
“You’re only allowed to show a picture of your product, say its name, and a five word description of what it’s for”.
Nothing like that is gonna be workable.
Such a hard problem.
People would also be better of without 90% of the ad-driven internet.