In a lot of countries in the EU, advertising for tobaco products, prescription medication, lawyer/docts are prohibited. That ban has been working quite well for decades.

Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company.

It’s about the compensation. That makes it advertising.

Regular booking.com is fine. Paying booking.com to allow your results to appear higher is not.

Regular Google Maps to register your restaurant is fine. Paying Google Maps to promote your restaurant is not.

It’s not that hard to implement. Advertising is pretty well defined.

> The Commission believes these terms are sufficiently clear and declines to add definitions of these terms.

- https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/federal_re...

anything where you take any kind of compensation/gift to display/discuss a product.

Just answer this question: do you get a compensation for showing me something that I did not click for?

What about just banning personalized advertising? Like: you can pay Google Maps to show your result as sponsored, but Google can only show it to either everybody or randomized people.

Let's drop the charade where you pretend you don't know what advertising is. You're smarter than that, and your playing dumb act would be more persuasive if you didn't ask leading questions that clearly show you know the answers. This isn't a good faith argument.

I mean are you really asking whether creators embedding "sponsored by" scenes is an ad as if you don't know? C'mon, don't insult your readers with this nonsense.

HN commenters are not legislators, and even if random HN commenters can't draft legislation, that doesn't mean that a minimally-funded team of experts would have any difficulty with the problem.

Putting on my cynic-hat:

1. Reform occurs, now ad-networks serve ads based on the content it appears near, rather than analyzing the viewer.

2. Ad-network says "You know, I'd pay more if you had a version of this content that drew people who were X, Y, Z..."

3. The sites start duplicating their content into hundreds of inconsequentially-different sub-versions, profiling visitors to guide them to "what fits your interests", but it's actually a secret signal to the ad-networks.

4. Ad-network, super-coincidentally, releases tools that can "help" sites do it.

I think that's revisionism. Social media existed before online advertising. Usenet was quite massive and vibrant, countless IRC servers were maintained by volunteers, web-based forums covered pretty much the same ground as Reddit does today. All supported by the goodwill of individuals, non-profits, and businesses such as ISPs that actively wanted the internet to be interesting because they were making money by selling access to it.

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.

I don't think we have a right to a business model. Either you figure one out for your particular site (selling access to the website, donations, etc) or you don't and stop and either is ok.

If it can only be funded via ads, it shouldn't be funded and is not essential to exist.

Users can pay for services they use.

If that's not viable enough, so be it.

HTTP Error 402: Payment Required was created for a reason. Maybe we need to rethink micropayments.

Banning ads? That's just so authoritarian and absurd. I hope you never become king

There should be no viable alternative to the free-because-your-attention-is-the-product business model because that is the core problem

Paying for content works just fine

Sounds good to me.

It's called paying for goods and services. You know, basic capitalism.

I think one thing to understand about advertising is that it fundamentally breaks the way capitalists say capitalism works. If you really want capitalism to be about competition to create the best quality at the lowest cost, then you can't have advertising. Advertising inherently drives up cost because it costs, and it allows lower-quality, higher-ost products to outcompete higher-quality, lower-cost products if they are better advertised.

And before some advertiser comes along and says, "But how will we find out about goods and services!?" Search engines. Independent reviewers. Word out mouth. Experts. These are solved problems.

And more to the point, advertising is literally the worst way to find out about goods and services. Mostly, advertising is simply lies, and when it's telling the truth it's not telling you the whole truth. If you're concerned about people being able to find out about goods and services with any accuracy, then you should be against advertising. Ads aren't information, they're misinformation which prevents consumers from making accurately informed decisions.

Why? Serious question. The internet was a mistake.

I think you can get most of the benefit by just banning targeted advertising.

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.

Paying someone for promoting your product or message. I don’t think it’s all that complicated. Talking about your own product on the internet is fine. Paying to promote your message wouldn’t be. TikTok and Reddit and Instagram aren’t trying to keep people endlessly scrolling because they are free-speech fanatics. It entirely comes down to “more time in app = more revenue”. Take away that monetization method and you take away the single incentive that has driven virtually every dark pattern that has developed in social media in the last two decades.

What counts as pornography? What counts as art? What counts as music? Please, yeah we know, we absolutely know categorization is hard, doesn't mean there is no benefit in having them and shaping them as we go.

Going too far - laws state that if you were paid for a testimonial by a firm, or if the firm provided the service or product you disclose / it counts as paid endorsements /

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.

Because you want to support the platform or because you don't want to see ads?

> gives poor people access to lots of shit that they otherwise wouldn’t have

Addiction is a precursor to poverty. If we accept the domino theory of "online advertising -> addictive design" then the fundamental evil becomes clear. Holding people in poverty in order to profit from their time and attention.

I agree. I think the main problem is personalized advertisement that incentivizes companies to record as much data as possible. I'd prefer if they worked like they do in print magazines. Every reader sees the same.

Lets say I'm reading a laptop review. Show me adds from the laptop manufacturer or of websites that sell said laptop. People reading the review are likely in the market for a laptop so it makes sense to show it. At most you could probably narrow it down to the country so a German doesn't get shown a Best Buy ad but thats as far as I would go.

>I think the free w/advertising model is not fundamentally evil

I think it's fundamentally anti-competitive.

There's already free ad-free social media, see countless services in the fediverse

Show HN isn’t advertising in the sense they are addressing: paying a website for space to promote something. There’s no payment taking place with Show HN. If no payment can be made, websites have to find another revenue model besides advertising, and don’t have an incentive to keep users addicted and endlessly consuming.

Nah, advertisement in general. Just make the internet a paid sub. We don't need influencers or snake oil ads. And without ads and influencers, there is no reason for meta to try to keep people infinitely stuck to their phones. They can get their cut just from a paid sub.

"Commercial speech" being protected by free speech laws anywhere is abhorrent. The advertising industry, in and of itself, seems abhorrent to me. It's one of the worst things humans have come up with, ever.

True, you can't separate ads vs sponsored content quite easily.

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.

Free speech is a thing in the EU too.

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.

Easy: free speech was never meant for and fought for advertising. Any judicial body who says otherwise is bullshiting people.

Conflating advertising with free speech is like conflating sex work with reproductive rights.

Outside of US free speech isn't the carte blanche it is stateside. There are guardrails, there are limitations pretty much everywhere else. Even in the US This militant application is fairly recent, post 1980s.

It would be worth a try to outlaw compensation for advertising. The spirit of free speech is usually that you aren’t being paid for it.

You don't need to ban advertising, you just need to ban paying for advertising. That doesn't harm free speech. When there's no money to be made the problem will sort itself out.

I'm not following the relationship - because you'd have to pay, thus it's not "free" speech? It's hard to argue that having to pay a minimal fee (of let's say $1 per month) would be something against free speech. But the payment shall remain anonymous obviously.

>How will you ban that without infringing on free speech

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.

What are you on about? Who’s speech? The speech of a massive multinational corporation? No thanks. I want the freedom to browse without getting pointless products shoved down my throat.

I'd say the first amendment is due for an overhaul anyway for a variety of reasons. (Heck, the whole constitution is.)

How does one start a new social media network in that world? Cover the $100 fee, essentially making it free to use? It would kill any competitors from being created, at least until inflation makes $100 worthless.

Microfiction:

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.

Don't you realize that those with money are the ones who have the means to build a culture? How do you propose we compete with Jeffrey Epsteins who have a shit-ton of money to spend on pushing whatever narrative they want to? Just look around and see the "culture" we're in.

Poor people pay more for ads (as part of product price), and suffer more because of ads (from misleading advertising for shit products like junk food and drugs, to having certain out of reach lifestyles based on purchasing crap they don't need hammered on them and getting in debt). They also pay with having a worse media landscape, worse social media, and many more (not to mention the influece big companies with big spending budgets get).

People would also be better of without 90% of the ad-driven internet.

Plain text with no tracking is cheaper than coffee.

So much so that one wonders whether that was the point.

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…

Ads are mostly evil. No one said that ads were inherently evil. It's bad enough that ads are mostly evil.

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’ve never figured out what I think advertising should be. I currently do basically everything I can to get rid of it in my life.

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.

Yeah I want my cake and to eat it too. I get annoyed when ads are irrelevant to me, and I get creeped out when they are too relevant.

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?

what if ads were displayed only on request? “hi, ad page, I need some shoes, let’s go!”

Pt 1 of the Miller test is just "I know it when I see it" where "I" is a hypothetical random person

Not just reality. Adversaries trying to find loopholes. Luckily the git history of law goes back millenia so its had some time to adapt to humans.

If you’re going to organize your society around the theory that humans don’t actually possess free will, you’re going to produce a fair number of outcomes that a classical liberal would find abhorrent.

People aren't lizards, however. You demonstrate that by engaging in the distinctly unlizardlike behavior of employing a false dichotomy to imply the opposite.

No, that's what case law is for. Modelling the zillion little details. One party claims something breaks a law another claims it doesn't, and then we decide which is true. The only alternative is an infinitely detailed law.

>I'm not saying legislation is a good solution but you seem to be making a poetic plea that benefits the abusers.

Only if you believe everyone else has no agency of their own. I think most people outgrow these things once they have something more interesting in their lives. Or once they're just bored.

Back when this thing was new, everyone was posting pictures of every food item they try, every place they've been to etc.. that seems to slowly change to now where there are a lot more passive consumers compared to a few polished producers.

If you're calling people delivering the content "abusers", what would you call people creating the content for the same machine?

I would say the core problem is that we lack a goal as society. If you only care about making money stuff like this happens regardless how many regulations you do.

you can't milk it if you ban it

But they ain't infinite (I assume). Maybe long, but finite. That is a big difference as it still gives meaning to the scrollbar. Infinite scroll is endlessly adding new content so you simply cannot scroll to the bottom.

The GDPR is a joke. Such a law should have prevented companies from collecting data in the first place. All we got are annoying pop-ups that do nothing for our privacy.

Companies that exist in the US don't have to obey EU laws. For instance the UK tried to tell 4chan that it needs to obey the UK Online Safety Act, and 4chan replied with, essentially, "fuck off".

Companies that try to do business in the EU have to follow EU laws because the EU has something that can be used as leverage to make them comply. But if a US company doesn't have any EU presence, there's no need to obey EU laws.

And the rest of the world should ignore US laws. Drug law, copyright law and of course, patent law. Let's throw it all in the bin, where it belongs.