Comment by preg_match

I just don’t find business model arguments particularly convincing. If your business model can’t support itself, I don’t think that’s justification to go out and do whatever.

So? Your business relying on serving malware is not a valid excuse for serving malware.

Not in Australia at least. There were ads for flash in the pan fitness and weight loss devices and various other wastes of money, but outright scams and illegal devices would have their ads pulled real quick.

I think your answer gives us a clue about what went wrong and where.

The fact that internet advertising is run by the big US tech behemoths, makes them difficult to go after by countries that have previously had sane advertising standards. The lack of US regulation is the winning car in the race to the bottom.

Good. Advertising is already incredibly expensive for society. It's time to stop externalizing the costs.

No, it just means it costs more and you have to care a lot more about targeting.

It was allowed to grow to its current "sheer scale" due to lack of regulation, be that internal or legislated.

Continued lack of regulation, throwing up ones hands and saying "well, it's too big now" will not allow it to be solved.

What has been 'normalised' in the online advertising industry sets my teeth on edge as someone with some amount of security and privacy awareness. Hence I go out of my way to block as much of it as possible, for myself and family and friends.

Even the FBI and NSA make public their recommendation to run ad blockers as a safety requirement for internet browsing. I would have thought this may be some kind of red flag to say that maybe you're doing something not quite as well as would be satisfactory.

If it is indeed impossible to vet all the traffic passing through your networks, then perhaps your networks' existence is itself the issue. Maybe it is indeed not possible to vet 30 billion ads, just like it's difficult for Facebook to moderate all 3 billion users.

Perhaps the actual problem then are these monolith platforms that have done such a good job "eating the world" that they can no longer properly function.

it has to be the website to start with; if the website is hosting malware, then it's the website's problem. Soon after that's implemented, the adtech companies will begin competing to solve the website's problem by promising clean, malware free ads, and will begin aggressively vetting ads. The monetization model will be preserved and the incentives will be properly aligned.

There is no universe in which 'gosh it's just too hard' is the correct answer.

That's a problem for adtech to figure out. Consumers shouldn't suffer.

I find myself a bit astonished whenever people have trouble with this idea.

We can just decide that if you can't afford a person to vet the ad, it's not allowed to run.

Yes. That will destroy the current online advertising industry. As tempting as it is to say "that's the point", that is in fact not the point. The point is, we are completely in our rights as a society to say through regulation that if you can't vet an ad with a human, you can't run it, and the capital structure can damned well do what it does best and accommodate that whether they like it or not. We absolutely can write laws that say that Google is to some extent directly liable for the ads they run. Nothing is stopping us, at least in principle.

Does that mean it will be a lot harder for the advertising industry? Yes. So be it. That is not a reason this can't happen. Is it expensive for them? Yes. I don't care that this means that they won't be able to run anywhere near as many ads.

It is not a stopper that it would be really hard for them. It should be harder than it is. It should not be profitable to build a vast surveillance apparatus to squeeze literal fractions of a penny at a time out of us. It should not be profitable to have this massive machine that can push such targeted malware at as.

We're not talking about some minor tweaks that they can toss a few AI tokens at. We're talking about regulation that would rewrite the entire social contract of advertising. A social contract that we have not really signed, either individually or collectively. We can do that. We can rewrite the contract. It's a permissible thing.

We don't have to have a massive surveillance state just to serve us ads. We don't have to have sports gambling advertising on television. We don't have to have billboards on our highways. We don't have to have extra-cheap mailing rates for ads. We don't have to have Roblox and other video game systems exploiting our children's psychologies with deceptive game currency practices and gambling mechanics. We don't have to have state-sponsored gambling running what everyone knows is a backdoor tax on the poor. None of these things are physically inevitable. None of these things are socially inevitable. There are reasons why these things do exist, which economists and game theorists and political theorists have various words for, but none of the reasons are because they are mandatory and we're just stuck with them forever because there are no other possible worlds.

> 30B daily ads just served by Google

I'm assuming that means ad impressions and not unique ads.

While I respect that you are posting constructively here you might also be the physical embodiment of the old joke that it is difficult for someone to accept a truth when their continued employment depends upon its falsehood.

The Web used to be a great place before surveillance capitalism and adtech took over. Some of us remember it. People participated because they wanted to. People contributed content because they enjoyed it. The incentive was a sense of community and contribution and shared knowledge - and usually there was no expectation of direct financial gain. Basic hosting was included in everyone's normal ISP plan. SEO wasn't a thing. Blogspam just to generate pages to host ads wasn't a thing. AI slop just to generate even more pages to host ads wasn't a thing. And there was still more genuine and worthwhile content out there than anyone could read in a lifetime.

If 95% of the modern Web disappeared tomorrow and all that was left was what people or organisations were still willing to contribute because they enjoyed it and/or it provided some direct benefit then the Web would probably be a much better place. I cite as exhibit A the fact that we're all here posting our thoughts on HN - itself a site that has always run without any of the intrusive advertising we're talking about - without any compensation or reward other than the enjoyment of the discussion and perhaps the chance to learn something new.

I see no reason to tolerate any sort of online advertising that conflicts with the above ideals. We should simply set rules that decide what is acceptable and drop legal nukes on any company - or indeed any entire business model or industry - that fails to comply. Low key advertising for YC's next round? I doubt a single contributor here minds the little banner that pops up at certain times of year. In-your-face auto-play videos that accidentally (or not - it doesn't matter) advertise something dangerous before your kid's favourite show plays? Sue everyone and punish the offending businesses without mercy. It's really not that complicated.

If you can't do something responsibly at scale then you don't do it at scale at all.

Yes, exactly, if programmatic deals aren’t possible to do safely then dont. There’s tons of stuff you can’t do safely programmatically, so we get people involved. Many such domains exist. The idea that advertising can’t be one of them is just the status-quo, not the only option.