Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7

"It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?"

"How do you define it?" is an oft-repeated and weak argument against regulation used by online commenters who likely are defending a self-interest in maintaining tha status quo behaviour of so-called "tech" companies.

Online advertising services are obviously capable of being defined as these are bought by advertisers and sold by so-called "tech" companies every day. These so-called "tech" companies define "products" and "services", offered for "free", all the time. The commercial purpose is facilitation of online advertising. This can be regulated.

Before the internet was opened to the public, commercial use was prohibited. Today, HN commenters would no doubt try to suggest that defining what is and is not "commercial use" would be "impossible". But it's too late. It was already done.

The uncomfortable truth for so-called "tech" companies is that _any_ regulation that affects the ability to collect data, conduct surveillance and assist the injection of advertising into people's "user experience" could have a significant impact on their "business model". Hence they try to argue _any_ regulation is unworkable. All-or-nothing. Perfect, 100% solution or nothing at all.

But regulation does not have to define _all_ advertising. It may only define advertising that meets certain criteria. All-or-nothing thinking is nonsensical in this context. By analogy, when so-called "tech" companies propose alleged "solutions" for privacy issues, do they propose one solution that offers total, complete "privacy". How do we even define "privacy". What they propose is usually some incremental improvement.

It is possible to limit online advertising through rules and regulations. Of course this is a unacceptable proposition for so-called "tech" companies. Their only viable "business model" depends on usurping the bandwidth of internet subscribers for surreptitious, unwanted data collection, real-time surveillance and online advertising.