upvote
Regulation is freedom. Think of ads powering the web as current day's lead in gas.
reply
Regulation is freedom? Peace is war, too, I guess.
reply
Restricting freedom of bad actors means enhancing freedom of everyone else.

Say a a kid started throwing tantrums at school. By not punishing/ removing him you restrict the freedom of everyone else.

reply
What we have now sure it's freedom. Let's try having our tax dollars work for us this time.
reply
Regulation took away your freedom when it took asbestos out of your house right? Please be serious.
reply
Tell that to the tobacco industry yeah?
reply
Yeah hospitals cost money
reply
Have we come to such a low cultural point that ads are seen as some kind of basic human right?

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.

reply
We're on a startup entrepreneur site. I'm not surprised it's seen as the lifeblood of the industry here. It sort of is.

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).

reply
I work in ads... :-/
reply
I think HGttG had a good solution for that involving a large spaceship.
reply
I mean really I work in filmmaking. Ads just fund most of my business.
reply
What do you do? Honest question
reply
I work on the production end. I’m a producer and production manager for live-action ads.
reply
Work in something else. I make significantly more doing poison ivy removal than I ever did or was ever going to working in tech.
reply
Are you willing to share rough numbers? Totally understand if not, just curious. Been thinking about something like this to get away from the AI force-feeding.
reply
Freedom of speech is a basic human right.

Ads are speech.

reply
>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.

reply
Ads aren't free speech, they are the absence of it, because you are paid for a preselected speech.
reply
We already ban tobacco ads on tv (in the us) is their freedom of speech violated?

I don’t think you need to count companies being able to put any message out there as free speech.

reply
That’s not even true in the United States (they’re ‘commercial speech’, which carries a still significant but lesser set of protections), never mind in Europe.
reply
Commercial speech rights are still part of the "free speech" bundle of 1A protections.
reply
> mmmmm yes thank you daddy may I have some more?
reply
If he's from the US, he's technically correct. That's the high level argument of Citizens United.

Granted, that's proven to be a horrible concept. So let's repeal that.

reply