Well, hang on. Your comment is fair minded, but to be fair we have to consider the context.

The context is that the courts have found Google holds two illegal monopolies within the online adtech market [1], the remedy for which has yet to be determined. Furthermore the DoJ has sued Meta for holding one as well and that trial is now underway. [2]

I don't know about you, but to me, if the counterparty breaches a contract, that contract is now null and void. Same goes for a social contract, and if someone tries to kill me or rob me, whatever social contract we may have had, is now null and void.

Fortunately Google and Meta aren't actually taking hits out on anyone as far as I know, but the fact remains that the market makers for these online ads, are either outright convicted criminals, or being sued by the government for such. I don't see that we have any social contract to respect or allow any of this. It is right, just and moral to oppose the very existence of online advertising in my opinion, until the illegal abuses are corrected.

If the court has resolved that Google's breaking the law, how about we get an injunction ordering them to halt their ad tech business until the remedies are implemented. Why are we going so easy on them?

You don't owe crooks anything, neither do I.

This isn't about being cheap or breaking a fair deal. It's about asking that law and order be restored within American business and society. What's the point of this society, what moral justification does it have to exist as it is, if it keeps on breaking its own laws to protect the most powerful?

Now it's unfortunate that publishers (websites) get caught in the crossfire of this, they might not agree with me when I say you should oppose all online ads full stop until the problem is corrected, but they are getting screwed by Google and Meta and they would be more than happy to see justice done.

[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/18/court-ruling-agains... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_v._Meta

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MaxikCZ 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is the best counterargument I have hard so far. Saving it and using it next time someone brings that up, hope you dont mind I stole it without generating $0.000000001 of ad revenue in compensation.

	▲	safety1st 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Dang I'll just have to pay for 0.00000001ml of my morning coffee some other way! Thanks and please share by all means. One of my siblings rightly points out how terrible modern online ads are: autoplay, clutter, surveillance, intrusion, malware, etc. They're totally right of course and my question is - how bad would all this be if the biggest ad market maker wasn't an actual literal convicted-by-multiple-courts criminal with the second biggest market maker not far behind? What if these guys had just followed the existing laws that are on the books? Well I don't know but I bet it would be better somehow and the only way to find out is to finally start enforcing the law. I'm sure ads would be better somehow if there were fewer criminals involved. One obvious theory is that Google is underpaying the publishers and the publishers have resorted to dirtier tricks in response. Another is that Google implements stuff everyone else hates because hello monopoly, where else are you going to go? Maybe the lawbreakers cause the slop.

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streptomycin 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You could block only ads from Google and Meta. Most large sites use header bidding, where Google's ads are a fallback only if no other ad company bids higher, so most ad revenue come from those other companies. And IIRC Meta doesn't participate in that at all, so for them you'd just have to block ads on their own sites.