Comment by camgunz
2 months ago
This law is no different than any other prohibition. It's not like we have to go back to the legal lab to figure out precisely what advertising is because, unlike things with clear definitions everyone knows like fraud, discrimination, or defamation, advertising is particularly nebulous.
Did you see which comment this is in reply to? It’s about your general description of people in tech to be hesitant and skeptical when it comes to banning things.
I'm confused by your comment, the posts are both mine? Even if I take what I think is the most charitable version of your "argument", which I think is "tech thinks things should by default exist and be permissible unless they pass an extremely stringent test", no pro-advertising person here is trying to find the outlines of what that test might be. They're all running right to "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization", which is absurd.
> "We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is
You are describing the ability of good engineers to deal with vague and ill defined problems.
> "We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway..
Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
> It's so transparent to me now
Hope I cleared up the confusion.
> "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization"
I am not - and did not make the claim. I am explaining why you are seeing engineers care more about vagueness in one context than another.
I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.
6 replies →