Comment by kragen
2 months ago
It's not a well-enough-thought-out proposal to call "radical"; it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away and that there would be no drawbacks to this. Even if we all agree that it's bad for people to say things they're paid to say instead of what they really believe, there are many possible approaches to writing specific laws to diminish that practice. Those approaches represent different tradeoffs. You can't say anything nontrivial about the whole broad set of possible policy proposals.
To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"
> it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away
It would? I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to craft or enforce (probably not constitutional in the US).
The very nature of advertising is it's meant to be seen by as many people as possible. That makes enforcement fairly easy. We already have laws on the books where paid advertising/sponsorship must be clear to the viewer. That's why google search results and others are peppered with "this is an ad".
> To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"
Except drugs/alcohol can be consumed in secret and are highly sought after. The dynamic is completely different. Nobody really wants to see ads and there's enough "that's illegal" people that'd really nerf the ability of ads to get away with it.
There's not going to be ad speakeasies.
Well, I agree that for the most part consumers try to minimize their exposure to advertising, but not always. Some extreme examples of commercial advertising that was or is highly sought after by its target audience include eBay listings, Craigslist posts, the Yellow Pages, classified ads, the Sears catalog, job offer postings, the McMaster–Carr catalog, Computer Shopper before the internet was widely accessible, and "product reviews" by reviewers who got the product for free. So it seems likely that there would, in fact, be "ad speakeasies".
But let's consider the other side of this:
> I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to [...] enforce
Suppose we consider the narrowest sort of thing we'd get the most benefit out of prohibiting, like memecoin pump-and-dump scams, which are wildly profitable for the promoters but provide no benefit at all to the buyers, so nobody goes looking for. We can get a preview of what that prohibition would look like by looking at the current state of affairs, because those are already illegal.
And what we see are fake Elon Musk live streams with deepfaked mouth movements, fake Elon Musk Twitter accounts that reply to his followers, prominent influencers like Javier Milei for no apparent reason touting memecoins they claim to have no stake in themselves, prominent influencers like Donald Trump touting memecoins they openly have stakes in, etc. I haven't heard about any memecoins making ostensibly unpaid product placement appearances in novels or Hollywood movies (probably crime thrillers) but it wouldn't surprise me.
How about sports stars? Today it's assumed that if a sportsball player is wearing a corporate logo, it's because the company is paying him to wear it. Suppose this were prohibited; players would have to remove or cover up the Nike logos on their shoes. Probably fans would still want to know which brand of shoes they were wearing, wouldn't they? Sports journalists would publish investigative journalism showing that one or another player wore Nike Airs, drank Gatorade, or used Titleist golf balls, and the fans would lap it up. How could you prove Titleist didn't give the players any consideration in return?
A lot of YouTubers now accept donations of arbitrary size from pseudonymous donors, often via Patreon. In this brave new world they would obviously be prohibited from listing the donors' pseudonyms, but what if Apple were to pseudonymously donate large amounts to YouTubers who reviewed Apple products favorably? The donees wouldn't know their income stream depended on Apple, but viewers would still prefer to watch the better-funded channels who used better cameras, paid professional video editors, used more informative test equipment, and had professional audio dubs into their native language. Which would, apparently quite organically, be the ones that most strongly favored Apple. Would you prohibit pseudonymous donations to influencers?
Commercial advertising is in fact prohibited at Burning Man, which is more or less viable because commerce is prohibited there. You have to cover up the logos on your rental trucks, though nobody is imprisoned or fined for violating this, and it isn't enforced to the extent of concealing hood ornaments and sneaker logos. But one year there was a huge advertising scandal, where one of the biggest art projects that year, Uchronia ("the Belgian Waffle") was revealed after the fact to be a promotional construction for a Belgian company that builds such structures commercially. (I'm sure there have been many such controversies more recently, but I haven't been able to attend for several years, so I don't know about them.)
Let's consider a negative-space case as well: Yelp notoriously removed negative reviews from businesses' listings if they signed up for its service. We can imagine arbitrarily subtle ways of achieving such effects, such as YouTube suggesting less often that users watch a certain video if it criticizes Google or a YouTube supporter (such as the US government) or if it speaks favorably of a competing service. How do you prohibit that kind of advertising in an enforceable way? Do you prohibit Yelp from removing reviews from the site?
Hopefully this clarifies some of the potential difficulties with enforcing a ban on advertising, even to people who don't want to be advertised to.
> Some extreme examples of commercial advertising that was or is highly sought after by its target audience include eBay listings, Craigslist posts, the Yellow Pages, classified ads, the Sears catalog, job offer postings, the McMaster–Carr catalog,
Listings that consumers actively seek are quite different from messages and content that companies try to place in front of people who haven’t asked for them.
It would seem both easy and reasonable to craft a law that bans advertising without banning listings of products and companies, product search engines, etc.
> How do you prohibit that kind of advertising in an enforceable way?
This seems similar to suggesting we shouldn’t ban e.g. price fixing or insider trading because they can be hard to detect and enforce.
That’s a fallacy. Most companies do not want to break the rules and risk enforcement (especially if the penalties are high), and a significant reduction and increase in subtlety of advertising would still be valuable.
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Any law would need enforcement but also a mechanism to punish not only the creator of the ad but the distributor as well.
It isn't that we couldn't get rid of memecoin ads, but rather that twitter simply doesn't have almost any incentive to crack down on and prevent these sorts of ads. Attach a fine with some grace period and I can guarantee you'll end up with twitter looking into ways to block spammers to avoid being penalized.
I also don't personally mind shill reviewers mainly because they are often exposed anyways and become easy to ignore. Doesn't mean you couldn't enforce an ad ban still, but it might only catch the bigger names.
I'd also posit, though, that ad mediums would be far more effective. For example, banning commercials in videos would be and easy enough law to craft and enforce that would make video sites a lot more pleasant to visit.
A ban wouldn't need to be perfect to be very effective at making things better.
I thought drug laws were a fine example, but let's look at another. It's illegal to bribe politicians. Does that mean there is no grift in Washington?
That has less to do with it being hard to craft bribery laws and more to do with the fact that the current bribery laws are entirely ineffectual. It's absolutely something that could be fixed, but certainly not something almost any politician would want to fix.
I will grant that companies would lobby hard against an anti-advertising bill (which means it'll likely never pass). That doesn't mean you couldn't make one that's pretty effective.
But, again, the nature of advertising makes it quite easy to outlaw. Unlike bribery, where a congress person can shove gold bars into their suit jackets in secret, advertising has to be seen by a lot of people to be effective. Making it something that has to be done in secret will immediately make it harder to do. The best you'll likely see is preferential placement of goods in stores or maybe some branding in a TV show.
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You argument sounds a bit like "crime exists despite laws against them also existing, therefore we should not have such laws".
What you seem to be missing is that, in the end, it's all about risks vs. potential gains.
As it stands, advertising is relatively cheap and the only risk is to lose all the money spent on it.
Once it's made illegal, that formula changes massively since now there's a much bigger risk in the form of whatever the law determines - fines, perhaps losing a professional license or the right to work on a certain field, or to found and/or direct a company, perhaps even jail time!
You're right, it will probably still exist in some ways in some contexts. I bet it wouldn't be nearly as pervasive as it is today though, and that's a win. And if it's not enough, up the stakes.
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Murder is illegal, but still happens. Therefore, by your logic, we should legalize murder.
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There are no drawbacks to making advertising illegal as long as the laws are written conservatively. Point out one. Notably "it won't actually prevent all advertising" isn't a downside--preventing, say, 80% of advertising is a heck of an improvement.
And FFS let's skip past the childish "how will people find out about products???" nonsense. You're an adult, use your brain. Consumer Reports exists, and in the absence of advertising that sort of content would flourish.
I note that you, too, have failed to make a policy proposal that is concrete enough to discuss usefully.
If only 80% of advertising were illegal, probably Consumer Reports could continue to exist, although they would be exposed to some legal risk of being ruled to be illegal advertising, probably prompted by a letter to the Attorney General from a company whose products they reviewed poorly or neglected to review at all. Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.
But possibly you are thinking of a different structure of regulation than I am, rather than just failing to think through its unintended consequences. It's impossible to tell if your proposal stays so vague.
> I note that you, too, have failed to make a policy proposal that is concrete enough to discuss usefully.
I never complained that you didn't make a policy proposal, so you can't say I'm a hypocrite here. In fact, I've been pretty clear in other comments that it's foolish to hold HN comments to the level of legislation.
> If only 80% of advertising were illegal, probably Consumer Reports could continue to exist, although they would be exposed to some legal risk of being ruled to be illegal advertising, probably prompted by a letter to the Attorney General from a company whose products they reviewed poorly or neglected to review at all. Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.
Straw man argument extraordinaire. Nobody is calling Consumer Reports advertising. On the contrary, I'm saying that independent review isn't advertising.
> But possibly you are thinking of a different structure of regulation than I am, rather than just failing to think through its unintended consequences. It's impossible to tell if your proposal stays so vague.
So maybe ask a question instead of assuming what I'm envisioning. Believe it or not, you're not obligated to guess what I'm thinking!
Legislation could pretty explicitly allow for independent reviewers: that's explicitly the solution I'm proposing to the lack of information.
> Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.
Sorry, which commenter is proposing that independent reviewers can't be in contact with companies whose products they review?
In my thinking, companies would be explicitly allowed to submit their products for review, although I think I'd want the reviewers to still pay for the products (i.e. not receive them for free or at a discount).
Current administration already made a bunch of radical decisions. What's another one?