Comment by toomim

> People who sell things need ways to find buyers.

No, you've got that backwards. People who sell things should have a way of announcing their product to the world. Buyers who are interested in that type of product should be the ones seeking out the companies, not the other way around.

The current approach of companies pushing their products to everyone is how we got to the mess we are in today. Companies will cheat, lie, and break every law in existence in order to make more money. Laws need to be made in order for companies to stop abusing people.

You know what worked well? Product catalogs. Companies buy ad space in specific print or digital media. Consumers can consult that media whenever they want to purchase a specific product. This is what ecommerce sites should be. Give the consumer the tools to search for specific product types, brands, specifications, etc.; get rid of fake reviews and only show honest reviews from verified purchases and vetted reviewers, and there you go. Consumers can discover products, and companies can advertise.

This, of course, is only wishful thinking, since companies would rather continue to lie, cheat, and steal, as that's how the big bucks are made.

I honestly find it disturbing that with all of humanity's progress and all the brilliant technology we've invented, all of our communication channels are corrupted by companies who want to make us buy stuff, and by propaganda from agencies that want to make us think or act a certain way. Like holy shit, people, is this really the best we can do? It's exhausting having to constantly fight against being manipulated or exploited.

> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels

This is not really advertising, but it’s not really a problem either. People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Besides, there are only so many channels you can possibly control.

> nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion!

Sure. Maybe this is advertising that slips through. If all were down to is people advertising their friends’s products for no money then we would have eliminated 99.99% of the problem.

Further, if you have a highly influential channel, the cost of promoting a non genuine opinion about a friend’s product would almost certainly hurt your reputation, providing a strong disincentive to do such a thing.

> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion.

But this is not the vast majority of 'advertising' or where advertising causes so much harm. A single individual has much less power to manipulate a single other individual, let alone thousands of other individuals. It takes millions of dollars to hire people with specialized marketing skills to do that.

> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels

Isn’t it? You receive money when people buy your product because of your advertising.

Yellow books used to do that. Because you're right it's a matchmatching problem.

I agree with the general thought - doing something like this would give giant mega corporations a huge leg up from verticals.

> Can ABC run commercials for Bounty paper towels, in exchange for Bounty putting ads for ABC shows on its paper towel packaging?

I was with you until this one

Under both IRS and GAAP rules, that's equivalent to money changing hands. So in a hypothetical "no money for advertising" world, that would be over the line.

I think you articulated the vagueness very well.

One other example I was thinking was product placement. Are these characters eating pizza? Or is it Pizza Hut®™ pizza?

> Is ABC allowed to run commercials for its own shows?

Well, not if they pay employees to do it. Except that shows aren't products, they're services, so they'd be exempt from this proposal.

It's remarkable that you put all that thought into coming up with holes in my one-line argument, and no thought into steelmanning it.

Since we're coming up with hypothetical laws and loopholes, here is a simple addendum to my original argument:

- Only applies for companies, and only to those with more than $100,000 ARR.

There. That avoids penalizing most of the personal advertising scenarios you mentioned. Since laws are never a couple of sentences long, I'm sure with more thought we'd be able to find a good balance that prevents abuse, but not legitimate use cases for informing people about a product or service.

Again, the goal is not to get into philosophical discussions about what constitutes advertising, and banning commercial speech, or whatever constitutional right exists. The goal is to prevent companies from abusing people's personal data, profiling them, selling their profiles on dark markets, allowing mass psychological manipulation that is threating our democratic processes, and in general, from corrupting every communication channel in existence. Surely there are ways of accomplishing this without endless discussions about semantics and free speech.

But, as I've said in other threads, this is all wishful thinking. There is zero chance that the people in power who achieved it by these means will suddenly decide to regulate themselves and kill their golden goose. Nothing short of an actual revolution will bring this system down.

> And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists.

Agreed. In the olden days before digital ads, product catalogs worked well. Companies would buy ad space in specific print media, and consumers interested in buying a product would consult the catalog for the type of product they're looking for. Making ads pull rather than push solves this awareness problem proponents of advertising deem so important. The reason they prefer the push approach is because it's many times more profitable for all involved parties. The only victims in this system are the people outside of it. The current system is making a consumer of everyone every time they interact with any content, when the reality is that people are only consumers when they're actively looking to buy something. Most of the time we just want to consume the content we're interested in, without being sold anything. It's the wrong approach, with harmful results, and the only reason we stuck with it is because it's making someone else very rich. It's absolute insanity.

Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising.

Listing a house for sale on an agent’s website: not advertising.

Promoting that listing or the agent on the home page of a local news site: advertising

etc…

Some cases will be harder, all are decidable. We are talking about law not code, so there’s no need for a perfect algorithm, the legal system is designed precisely to deal with these sorts of question.

The fact that the boundary can be a bit blurry does not prevent it to be useful. Yes there may be corner cases to thunk about ans that can vary, as with all laws. It's bot perfect but its better than current out of control situation.

The line doesn't matter, because advertising is protected by the First Amendment.

Who would think it's not advertising?

Candidate endorsements (and political advertising in general) are core political speech. You can't outlaw it in the US.

I feel like all the “targeted audience” stuff is used more to sell ad space and get its metrics rather than actually “targeting” ads.

Simply make it illegal to base the choice of what ad to show on any data derived from the person accessing the content. The same content accessed by different people from different locations should have the same ad probability distribution. You can still do old-school targeting by associating static content with certain types of ad a priori, as long as the shown content is independent of the user and not generated from any user data.

That's only part of the problem.

I'd happily support that but the harms of advertising go beyond the problems of surveillance capitalism so heavily restricting ads seems like a good idea on its own.

You're presenting an idea here by means of a lot of implicit leaps, and I don't even know where I'm supposed to leap to at each stage. It's like a logic game that I'm failing at.

What's the connection between adverts and the amount of money Ghibli made on their best-loved movie?

Hmm, maybe none, maybe you're using Ghibli as a metaphor for products that make money through adverts. And maybe the implied answer to the next question is that their next movie, The Cat Returns, would have been higher quality if they had made even more money on Spirited Away. So what you could be saying is that crippling the ad industry would lead to lower quality products, without even much reducing the number of (less effective) adverts that get made.

That's one way to read what you said, but I feel like I got it wrong.

exchanged with whom? If it's a small business, it's likely the owner puts the sign out themselves.

Or is it money exchange with sign manufacturer? In this case are outdoor signs OK if owner personally made them?

Commercial speech is also widely recognized to have lesser First Amendment protection than personal, political, or ideological speech, and there are cases of advertisers losing in court, c.f. Spann v J.C. Penney, as well as decisions that explicitly limit the First Amendment protections of commercial speech.

Trying to ban all advertising of course wouldn’t get anywhere (especially under the current SCOTUS), and the article’s author clearly hasn’t really thought through the implications. But there is a legal door that is ajar, in the Central Hudson test, and could potentially be widened by arguing that some classes of today’s advertising are against the public interest; the First Amendment is already not blanket covering all commercial speech.

Should it be?

I think the language is OK, it’s just that you are consistently ignoring “in order to promote a product” clause.

The first case is legal because waiter gets paid by the restaurant to serve meals, not to promote the specific brand of rose wine. Only illegal if the waiter has another, secret contract with the wine manufacturer to “recommend” specific wine.

The other two cases are legal because the money exchanged in order to receive goods. The fact the goods are then used to promote something is irrelevant.

I'm not a lawyer, nor is it my job to come up with loophole-free regulation. People in those professions can think hard about this problem, and do a much better job than some layperson who thought about it for a few minutes on an internet forum. Even for them, though, coming up with laws without loopholes that are not too restrictive in legitimate situations is often impossible, so it's ridiculous that you would expect the same from me.

That said, after thinking about it for a few more minutes, I can think of one simple addendum to my initial criteria. I wrote about it here[1], so I won't repeat myself.

It's asinine that this discussion is taken to extreme ends. We don't need to ban all forms of advertising and get into endless discussions about semantics and free speech in order to stop the abuse of the current system. There is surely a middle ground that does it in a sensible way. The only reason we don't fix this is because the powers that be have no incentives to do so, and the general population is conditioned and literally brainwashed to not care about it.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43599948

And we already regulate actual broadcast on this basis.

For example, it violates no rule to include valid Emergency Broadcast System/Emergency Alert System tones (the electronic, machine-interpretable "chirps") in a movie or TV show, or to publish that via streaming, DVD etc. But no one does this, because broadcasting spurious tones (and triggering spurious automated broadcast interruptions) carries serious first-instance fines to which FCC licensees (ie distributors via broadcast) agree as a condition of licensure. They know they aren't allowed to do this and, very occasional and expensive mishaps excepted, they won't take the risk. (1) So program material that wants to include those tones has to make sure they're excluded from the TV edit, or decide whether the verisimilitude is worth the limit on audience access.

While the specifics of course vary among cases, the basic theory of broadcast (ie distribution) as distinct from and less protected than speech, with the consequential distinction drawn specifically along the scale at which speech is distributed, seems clear.

(1) Some may note instances such as one of the Purge films (iirc) that seem to contradict this claim. Compare the tones in those examples with the ones in test samples or generated by a compliant encoder [1] for the "Specific Area Message Encoding" protocol. Even without a decoder, the FSK frequencies and timings have to be resilient to low-bandwidth channels designed to carry human voice, so it's all well within audible ranges and you can hear the difference between real tones and what a movie or show can safely use. Typically either the pitch is dropped below compliant ranges, or the encoding is intentionally corrupted, or both. But almost always, the problem is just sidestepped entirely, since it's the attention tone that everyone really notices anyway.

[1] https://cryptodude3.github.io/same/ is no more certified than mine but has, unlike my own implementation, been tested against a real EAS ENDEC. At some point I want to test mine against that one and find out how badly I screwed up reading the spec ten years ago...

Were you paid to talk about the product? If not, then it’s constitutionally protected speech. If there is any kind of payment, it’s advertising. If it’s advertising, follow the law.

>not many people want ads

A whole lot of money wants ads though.

I agree with this. Any law that's not universally enforced: speeding, jaywalking, tax audit, etc is a tool for political persecution.

All laws have blurred lines. I guess you could say some are a lot more blurred than others.

You've just described how laws actually work - but we have created modern judiciary system so that it will tend to produce outcomes considered fair by the majority. Algorithmic enforcement of justice without human deliberation of case-by-case specifics would be worse that the worst horror stories about soulless bureaucracies.

That's why we have judges and lawyers, so that the outcome can be decided as a communal process instead of just one person deciding what is punishable - even if the person is the developer building the automated justice dispenser and they'll be not around when the decision is taken, it would still be made by the whims of a single enforcer.

No, what it does is require the courts to interpret the meaning of the word and create precedent. That’s not the same as selective enforcement.

> North Korea is the only country that bans advertising.

Outright banning, yes maybe. But many countries or local governments severely regulate advertising in one form or another, and no one is crying foul either.

Can you point to an airtight law regarding speech that exists today - both as written and enforced? I can't.

This is a worse is better[1] situation. Specifically, I'm arguing against the MIT approach to lawmaking.

The MIT approach:

> The design must be consistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.

Thinking about laws like software terminates thought.

1. https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html

That's where we are right now. Airtight laws are impossible in complex systems.

I guess I could have been more specific.

...an entity A pays some other entity B to transmit some specific content to a third party to induce the third party to take action that benefits the paying entity A.

No, that's why I said 'unsolicited' rather than 'third-party', so take the motorway billboard toll road example - if you also happen to own the car dealership or the webapp, you can't advertise that, because that's not what I've come to your motorway for.

And what's solicited or 'relevant' doesn't need to be rigidly defined in statutes (assuming common law) - the ASA or OfCom whoever it would be (UK examples) slaps fines on the rulebreakers and if they think they've interpreted the law correctly in good faith then it goes to court and we find out (and the growing body of case law helps future would-be-advertisers interpret it).

The existing advertisement disclosure rules for social media for example don't allow the loophole you propose: a 'sponsored' segment shilling a product in a YouTube video isn't considered different from directly selling video time to the third-party in which to run their own ad reel.

Same as they always have?

No but your doctor would have to think twice about recommending this drug that he got to know about at the company sponsored golf trip.

No. Why would they?

You understand there's a difference between a photo of a restaurant and a restaurant itself?

Then illegal. Simple. And I like it tbh

So we exempt waiters. No one seriously thinks waiters are what the article is about.

Webpages also have the ability to capture far more data about who is viewing the ad, with the use of tracking cookies, browser fingerprinting etc..

There is a big difference between advertising and information. First, most people are generally not being paid by big energy alternatives to promote it. Of course we can talk about things. What we wouldn't be able is to be paid by someone to have a specific public discourse.

Yep, I hadn't considered things from this perspective at all. Thank you!

Every good rule had exceptions. Advertising vaccines is fine.

Frankly, we should advertise more education - then maybe we wouldn't have some of our current issues.