Comment by barnabee
2 months ago
> 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.
> 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.
I can't help noticing that you haven't ventured to attempt it in your comment. Why not?
> Most companies do not want to break the rules
This line makes me wonder if you have ever worked for a company. This is occasionally true of some rule, but only when it's the companies that break the rules that go out of business. In environments where the only survivors are the ones that break the rules, eventually most of the remaining companies do want to break the rules. Since enforcement is never perfect, in competitive markets, most companies want to break the rules just slightly: enough to compete effectively but not enough that enforcement makes them unprofitable.