Comment by permo-w

>but we'd also lose (free) search engines.

I doubt this. more likely we'd end up in a scenario where, as a way of capturing market share, large companies subsidise their search engine with other branches of their business, for example, hosting. also since we're speaking hypothetically about government interventions, there's no reason that a government couldn't set up a publicly owned search engine, in fact one may already exist, I don't know

>Further, I'd argue that some forms of advertising are actually desirable. If I'm planning a vacation abroad, and want to make a reservation at a hotel, I'd typically go to booking.com or one of it's competitors. Those sites are pretty much 100% advertising, but how else am I gonna find a hotel on the other side of the planet, in a country I've never been before?

it's not advertising if it's on their own website

>You also run into some tricky hairsplitting questions. Where do you draw the line on advertising? Are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? Or is that advertising? I don't want to outlaw online shopping entirely, it's extremely handy! What about search engine results from those webshops? Free search engines will disappear, but let's say I have a paid account and search for "buy dell laptop". Are the results advertising? How do you differentiate and define the cases legally?

these are very simple dilemmas:

are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? yes, because you're on a webshop. practically all shops sell 3rd party products. advertising is listing products and services on non-commercial public places where people haven't chosen to engage with products

you search for "buy dell laptop", and the search engine has to produces the results that naturally bubble to the top from its algorithm

the issue I'd be more worried about with banning advertising is taking away the freedom it can allow small creators on places like Youtube, where now suddenly they'd be relying on subscriptions and/or donations, which can be a lot harder to come by than baseline advertising revenue. you'd get a lot more begging and pleading, and you'd get a lot more creators needing to rely on working under the umbrella of a larger organisation like they did before the internet