Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising?

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?

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coldtea 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising?

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.

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AnthonyMouse 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It's a corporation though. It can't do anything without paying someone to do it, unless someone volunteers to do it for free, which isn't very likely. 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.

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coldtea 7 hours ago | parent [-]

>And how do you self-host distribution?

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.

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AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago | parent [-]

If you pay some hosting provider then you're obviously paying someone, 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.

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coldtea 7 hours ago | parent [-]

>If you pay some hosting provider then you're obviously paying someone

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.

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AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law.

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?

	▲	6 hours ago \| parent [-]
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jason_oster 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Advertising is a monetary transaction between an advertiser and a publisher. The customer (or product) is not involved in the transaction; it is their attention that is being bought and sold.

That's a different model than paying a technical writer to do technical writing.

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AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago | parent [-]

You're contrasting authorship with distribution. The advertising equivalent to paying a technical writer is paying an ad agency to create the ad. The customer isn't a party to that transaction either.

But now how are you distributing either of them?

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jason_oster 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I am not making such an error. Paying a technical writer for labor is not the same as paying a publisher for conversions. The scenario you posed was "hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it." Those are two parties, each of which is paid independently for services rendered. The customer is not selling their attention, here. The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.

Advertising is not distribution. Publishing is distribution, and advertising sometimes comes along for the ride.

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AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The proposal was to "outlaw compensation for advertising". That would presumably include paying people to create ads and not just to publish them, hence the first example. What you're arguing is that the first example is different from the second one, but they were intended to be, because they map to two different parts of the process.

> The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.

Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.

And then the question is, how do they get it? There are many ways to distribute. They could pay to print it out on paper and put it in the lobby in their corporate offices, but then customers would have to come to their corporate headquarters to get it, which most won't do, so obviously some methods of distribution have a higher likelihood of being seen. Then companies will prefer the ones that allow them to be seen more.

But they're paying someone for any of them, so "is paying for it" isn't a useful way to distinguish them.

And then we're back to, suppose you pay Facebook to host your documents on your company's Facebook page. Furthermore suppose that they, like most hosting companies, charge you more money if you get more traffic. Meanwhile their "hosting customers" on the "free tier" (i.e. ordinary Facebook users) have a very small quota which is really only enough for their posts to be seen by their own friends. So paying them for distribution -- like paying for any other form of distribution -- causes your documents to have better visibility. Now you can show up in the feed of more people before you run out of quota, just like paying more for hosting means more people could visit your website before you exceed your transfer allowance.

How do you tell if someone is paying for computing resources or eyeballs when the same company provides both? Notice that "don't let them do both" is a bit of a problem if you also don't let them sell advertising, because if they can't sell ads or charge for using the service then what are they doing for revenue?

	▲	jason_oster 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed, advertisers would layoff or displace their marketing teams, as the role would have no value to the company if advertising was outlawed (meanwhile, technical writers would be just fine). I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing the framing you put forth that equates advertising with technical writing. > Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product. I agree with this statement, but it is irrelevant. The primary purpose of documentation is what I said: for understanding how to operate the product. The only purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Advertising has no secondary purpose. These are not the same thing. The test is quite simple: Is the sole purpose of the payment to make a sale? If so, it is advertising. We don't really need to discuss documents any longer. Documentation is not an advertisement.

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layer8 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are legal definitions of advertising, I’m sure the courts will be able to figure it out.

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AnthonyMouse 8 hours ago | parent [-]

The "legal definition of advertising" is the thing you have to write into the law you want to enact. If you can't answer the question as the proponent of the proposal then how is a judge expected to do it?

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coldtea 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What the parent is getting at is it's not a mystery, such definitions already exist in all kinds of jurisdictions.

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.

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AnthonyMouse 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of 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?

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coldtea 7 hours ago | parent [-]

>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.

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.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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. 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.

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layer8 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m saying that these definitions already exist, and are being appllied by courts. It’s not a novel concept. I’m also not interested in arguing about exact definitions. We all know well enough what an ad is, in particular the kind we don’t want to see when browsing the web. My main point was to illustrate how I don’t consider this to be a free speech issue.