Comment by kmacdough
2 months ago
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?
Seems you're insistent on letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is precisely why judges exist. It would not be difficult to define Ads well enough to cover 99% of current advertising. Sure there will be gray areas. Advertisers will adapt. But it would make it profoundly more expensive, difficult and risky.
I'm not sure I understand a concrete economic argument other than "anything which makes it harder for businesses to be wildly profitable off minimal value hurts the economy". But that only really holds of you define the economy by things like GDP, which really just capture how wildly profitable companies are and have almost no bearing on quality of life for the people; in other words, the argument is circular.
A sign on the front of a store is advertising. If we ban these how will you even know what stores there are downtown?
The author specifically mentioned paid 3rd party. So an individual/business can “advertise” all they want for their services, but paying other entities to “speak” for them is not allowed. Yes, i can find all kinds of loopholes too. Thats what judges are for.
I’ll play.
Assume paying for others to advertise for you is illegal. What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right?
What about them wearing a sign so they don’t have to shout? Driving with a sign on a car?
Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that.
How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line?
I am not an advertising apologist. I hate ads with the power of a thousand suns. I use an ad blocker. But this idea of making advertising illegal is just a non-starter. It goes against the basic tenants of freedom of speech.
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