Comment by imiric
2 months ago
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.
Your addendum, "Only applies for companies, and only to those with more than $100,000 ARR," doesn't help at all; it still prohibits the three examples in most cases and still has the barter loophole.
If you can't figure out how to express what you want in such a way that it doesn't immediately collapse upon the most casual attempt at critical thought, the problem probably isn't that the population is brainwashed. It's probably that what you want is to eat your cake and still have it, a logical contradiction that could never exist in any possible world.
You seem to think that the law is something that can be delegated to the lawyers. But in fact the law balances conflicting interests. If you don't participate in defining it, your interests won't be taken into account. A law written by lawyers without outside input will only serve the lawyers' interests, not yours.
It's not the role of citizens to come up with regulation that protects them. It's not their role to protest or even acknowledge that they are being abused. It's the role of governments and law makers to ensure the safety of their citizens. This is literally what we elect and pay them to do.
If you can't see how the current system is harming not just individuals, but the stability of governments and our democratic processes, and the role of the advertising industry in all of this, then nothing I nor anyone else says can convince you otherwise.
You seem more interested in scrutinizing hastily put together arguments by laypeople on an internet forum, than acknowledging the issues put forth, and the fact that fixing this deeply rooted problem will require multi-faceted solutions over a very long period of time.
And for that reason, I'm out.
I agree that the current system is harmful in exactly the ways you describe, but I don't see you contributing anything towards solving those problems or even understanding what a solution would consist of. Instead you are criticizing policymakers for failing to satisfy your preferences even though you can't articulate them coherently yourself.
This:
> It's not the role of citizens to come up with regulation that protects them. It's not their role to protest or even acknowledge that they are being abused. It's the role of governments and law makers to ensure the safety of their citizens.
is not a description of the relationship between citizens and a democracy. It's a description of the relationship between subjects and a monarch or dictator—a relationship which invariably results in serious abuses of those subjects.
If you don't have a coherent idea of what you want, nobody can give it to you.