Comment by Postosuchus
3 days ago
You clearly misunderstand the sheer scale of online advertising (compared to linear TV ads, magazine ads etc). There is no chance you can vet every single creative and a landing page (one public number is 30B daily ads just served by Google alone in 2012 - which is probably closer in spirit to the Punic Wars than to 2026).
That's the first point. Now, who should be responsible for getting the ads? The website? That will absolutely kill the monetization model and it is simply unrealistic. Which means, that responsibility now should be pinned on someone else. Who would that be? My point being that no one there has an inherent lawful obligation to provide such vetting, which would be a) costly and b) only applicable to one player (out of many).
And then we get to bad actors. If I were a really motivated bad actor as early as in 2005, I was serving different creatives and different landing pages to different audiences - a perfectly well-behaved ones to Google's crawlers (again, Google does A LOT to fight malware), a questionable quality clicky ones to general audiences and maybe malware-ridden ones to specifically targeted audiences. And you would not be able to catch me in real time - only after the fact, once the campaign was run and someone looked at the evidence (assuming it was collected, which it isn't normally)
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.
If you really read what I wrote above - there is no "monolith" (and yes, Google is everyone's favorite Boogeyman). AdTech is a primordial pool all kinds of actors, each of which has found a profitable niche to "add value" (or to bullshit partners about "adding value").
I spoke of the network in specific. Whether we're discussing one firm dumping industrial quantities of sewage into the internet, or 10,000 tiny ones, doesn't really change at all that there's industrial quantities of sewage.
I'm critically uninterested in the fictions of the business idiot class. I'm sure for many purposes it's important for all the papers to have the proper LLC's on them. For the purpose of burning it to the ground though, it's not overly important.
They definitely have not 'solved scale' as it refers to commonly understood 'for for purpose'.
They 'solved scale' for being able to profit from it though.
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.
You have to be specific what you mean by "ads" then. If you mean creatives that ultimately rendered - you are absolutely correct. I don't have any stats handy to check the ratio between the two to estimate the number of unique creatives, but I believe it is a) several orders of magnitude smaller but b) still very very large.
And again, we are talking about logical creative (the actual visible part). Click URLs and such will definitely be different.
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.