Comment by imiric

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.