Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Someone, especially a someone with a smartphone and poor impulse control, might lose $200K investing in a cryptocurrency. The sort of person who has that money to lose is either retired or reasonably wealthy, and therefore has the time or self-advocation skill to have an incremental influence on legislation or regulation.
In general, health supplements, miracle berries, etc. sit on dubious scientific ground: many have either not been extensively studied, or have been studied and shown to have no discernible effect (good or bad). The assertion here is not that açaí itself is bad per se, but that it is marketed as being healthy with little or no scientific evidence to back that up - and therefore that people are being convinced to waste their money through deceptive marketing, in that they imagine themselves to be getting a health benefit that likely does not exist.
Is this commonly used to refer to acai berries? The only "miracle berry" I know of[1] is named for the effect on perception of flavor caused by the chemical miraculin, which is produced by the berry.
They're also extremely fun to introduce to people who have never tried them before, and I highly recommend them for your next party.
You're absolutely right.
And this is an easy, almost childishly obvious end-around to get at free speech. If speech is "political speech," then it is subject regulation suite A. If it is "advertising", then it is subject to regulation suite B. If it is "legal or medical advice," on and on.
Until there are no spaces left between the suites, and all speech is regulated.
Should IRL streets be the only place where pure free speech is allowed?
Should the entire internet be a purely corporate space with no constitutional rights permitted, only private access?
If we are advised to avoid their near monopolies, should we simply wait for another corporate giant to take their place?
In order to exercise our rights of free speech, must we erect our own commercial entities? If so, in what way is the government we're supporting working for us?
The venn diagram between the free-speech-or-death people and the market-will-decide people is often very overlapped but your example is a concrete existing example where you COULD publish a false prospectus as an expression of your free speech but you would find yourself very quickly more poor and more incarcerated.
I agree we should disallow and punish publishing false prospectuses, but I disagree that cryptocurrency advertising should be completely banned from google. I think it's an overreach of monopolistic power.
As a corporate entity, google has too much power to choose what competing businesses succeed, and social progress spreads. I don't even own or have any interest but passing in cryptocurrency, but I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to make their businesses, subject of course to financial regulations.
At one time, we were quite free in many countries, but large corporations have put strangleholds on free speech, a fact so well-documented I'm not compelled to source it here.
W/r/t your non-sequitor on fradulent stock prospectuses, that's moving the goalposts quite a bit from cryptocurrency advertising. It's so far afield, I'm struggling to understand why you included it in this discussion, but out of respect for you, I'm attempting to connect it to the previous ideas about cryptocurrency offerings. It seems you're implying cryptocurrency advertising is, by definition, fraud? Is that the case? Do you care to elucidate?
I posted my open questions because we should be thinking about what we want for societies around the world, not merely conforming to legal precedents set by corporate entities.
But I was making a different point:
I was talking about impending regulations (per GP), not about the speech permissiveness of private platforms.
I am thinking that only applies to people who invested in cryptocurrency.
I'm a little concerned though that Google's ban here seems to go beyond just ads for currencies themselves. For example, is Brave no longer allowed to advertise its browser on Google because there's a cryto coin associated with it? Are exchanges or hardware wallet manufacturers like TREZOR no longer allowed to advertise their services? If so, I think these restrictions might be overly broad.
The latter -- yes, that's ridiculous. But not the former. Companies whose stock is traded publicly do advertising all the time. The intended audience for the ads isn't limited to potential buyers of their product. It's often also useful for swaying shareholders, potential shareholders, regulators, etc.
What do you think will cause regulation to happen more quickly:
1) Internet advertisers allowing scammy advertisements ?
2) Internet advertisers using their power for political aims and demonstrating it works for that ?
I think going for 2, as they inevitably do when they outlaw advertisements for almost any reason other than being outright forced by a court to do so, will make politicians see them (correctly or not) as an existential threat and get them regulated faster than you can say "machiavelli".
(Domestic lie-based advertising is apparently fine in the US so long as the money is from the US)
Speaking of substitutes, Google and Facebook have a strong incentive to squander cryptocurrency. The long vision is a direct threat to the way they operate, and to the very question of whether or not they should exist.
If there was some hypothetical way to decentralize search, email or even social interactions, DLT research is likely the path forward. The whole point is that the nodes cannot trust each other, creating a sort of differential company, where search is provided entirely by those who are searching.
This is vastly different to Google's model which had the ease of assuming that they owned all of the nodes. Perhaps this is why Google and Facebook happened first in human history; they were simpler inventions. I truly believe the decentralized option is better for society, and so it will inevitably exist. Emergent protocols are changing the way I think about how computers talk to each other.
I don't see how that's true?
You mean, paying for the infrastructure with ads? As soon as most of that money is routed elsewhere, YouTube has little other option than to invoice operation costs with creators (or shut down the service). The BAT doesn't provide a solution for hosting.
It certainly would still be extremely unlikely that a victim would be successful in suing Google for damages of a trap they stepped into due to Google-supplied ads (just imagine what that would mean for kickstarter...), but chances of getting caught are not the line between right and wrong.
No. They can't. Countries have laws that regulate what companies can and can't do. That's why so many companies have had to pay fines in the past. To assert that "private business ... can do what they want" deteriorates democracies and the rule of law.
update: My comment is not about if Google did right or wrong, or if it's legal or not for them to ban cryptocurrency ads. My comment it's just a response to the parent about how private companies "can do what they want". Sorry for writing a comment so open to misinterpretation. I hope this clarification helps.
There is neither law nor regulation in the United States or California demanding that advertising be accepted and served outside of certain limited scenarios, such as elections. Anticompetitive concerns are handled via other means and do not apply. So, yes. They can. And their doing so doesn’t undermine democracy in any sense. If you believe this incorrect, the courts are at your disposal.
Do you have any idea how often the networks reject television advertising, by the way? One national spot I worked on took five tries to be accepted for air. Advertising media needs a rejection mechanism (else you’d get Bud Light ads on the Disney channel), and citing a civics lesson to lament it is just silly.
Right now, no one is responsible for the poisonous mixture of fake-news / radicalizing context coupled with attention based internet economy where the only incentive an internet content business has is to grab more and more eyeballs. Google (and others) simply shirk their failures by claiming "to give users what they want", when instead their employees are busy devising more and more elaborate ways to grab someone's eyeballs.
Who decides what’s fake news. Trump said there was problems in Sweden. NYTimes called him out on it. Not even a year later they are writing about the problems in Sweden.
So was the fake news trumps comment? Or the denile and lying by the media?
Maybe we should just censor everything. Censor trump, the media, advertising, everything. Not like the media is worth a grain of salt these days.
I am concerned by this trend. Instead of more open and more honest reporting in mainstream media, the governments try to silence those who post controversial stories - even when they are true, or at least not any more false than "accepted" news.
[Trump's comment about Sweden was false in the sense that "last night" nothing very unusual happened in Sweden; it was true in the sense that every night there were some things that you wouldn't expect from a country that has been so stable for so long as Sweden has, even though the claims about "civil war" in Sweden are highly exaggerated.]
This is the consequence of the nature of the beast: a broadcast platform that lives off of advertisements. You can't force Google to not do what their advertisers want.
I see no reason at this time why those with advertiser-unfriendly viewpoints can set up alternative platforms, that do not necessarily need to cater to big-corporate advertisers. At this point (at least in the United States), you don't have the situation in some nations where there is just one viewpoint (the state media) and alternative opinions are silenced not by demonitization, but by police/army force.
Content and ads are very different things. Stopping lucrative crypto ads certainly will financially hurt Google, but is definitely a win for consumers. Most crypto advertising is 100% scams. There's a huge difference between letting someone speak their mind on your platform (content) versus accepting money to broadcast their message on your platform (ads).
As for content, that's completely different (and a slippery slope). I won't pick a side on free speech vs protecting people, but I will say I'm very glad I don't have to choose where to draw the line.
They’ve been removing videos from YouTube also. Which they are free to do, it being their platform, but my point is that they are removing content also.
But, to your point: are they? Outside of copyright infringement and downright illegal content, are they really removing any videos? I googled it, and all I found were terrorists and copyright infringement being removed.
I see what you did there :D
Even former Rep Ron Paul's Youtube channel was demonetized--which is frankly just insanely ridiculous.
Meanwhile media reports extremist content such as Nazi propaganda is available?!
Another example is anti-Trump, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
I'm not exactly sure who can be said is being "protected" by retaliating against Paul and Shapiro?
It's their platform, but without either competition or regulation they're quickly becoming an unreasonable Thought Police.
1-https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xw5bxk/youtube-ne...
Google is very loathe to remove videos. I haven't seen that often, outside of copyright infringement or something truly illegal.
Demonetization is different. It's basically saying "we'll let you talk... But we don't want to reward you and charge our advertisers for it". It's a hugely slippery slope, of course, but... It's one thing to demand free speech (which Google isn't legally required to allow), yet a completely different thing to demand Google pay people they disagree with.
The top parent comment was not making a legal "demand" but was expressing concern and hope for a fair competitor to arise which treated different viewpoints in a neutral manner.
> "ads not content"
Nevertheless many content producers rely on ads to sustain themselves, and so by unfairly demonitizing viewpoints google/facebook disagrees with, the argument can be made they are doing evil. And especially considering their power as gatekeepers of the modern avenue of public discourse, we should be very concerned about them picking sides, especially for topics with a political component.
perhaps all channels with political goals (candidates, parties) should be demonetized.
Most of the media is owned by a small number of corporations and they want you to get your ideas and info from them.
It's exactly this line of thinking that got us here. This 'private business' is a lot of people doing the same thing (in this case censoring things, as much as I hate ads, this is censorship). But people who use their products can't organize themselves in this way (they are not a single entity) and can't boycott them when shit like that happens. They can't leave independently either since it puts each of them them at a disadvantage ("everyone else is using it").
That's why Google must be slapped as hard as possible here - because they are nearly a monopoly.
It's probably not YouTube demonitizing content that they personally find disagreeable. It's most likely advertisers that find it disagreeable that their ads show up next to objectionable content: advertisers don't control precisely which videos their ads show up next to - they just target them to certain types of content. So advertisers need to have confidence in Google's decisions that ad-enabled content is reasonably appropriate for them. Instead, advertisers will threaten to pull their ads from Google's platforms entirely if it doesn't self-police adequately in terms of deciding which content is allowed on the platform and ad-enabled.
That was really the controversy with Logan Paul. He had top-tier status with YouTube (Google Preferred) meaning that YouTube positioned his channel as suitable for advertising from the biggest, most risk-averse brands, and those brands flipped out about the potential of appearing before his suicide forest video. See https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/youtube-changes-partne...
> In addition, YouTube said all videos in Google Preferred — representing the top 5% most-viewed channels — will be reviewed by human moderators before they’re monetized. YouTube also is rolling out a three-tiered “suitability system” for advertisers to select their level of comfort with content they’re buying ads against.
If advertisers were generally happy to have their content show up alongside any sort of videos, then YouTube might as well. There's another aspect of this which is YouTube kicking content off their platform that isn't even monetized at all, but that probably relates to the same problem again, where advertisers wouldn't want to monetize on a platform that's known for hosting objectionable content generally. (Porn sites don't tend to run a lot of mainstream ads, for example.)
Note that this description is intended to be a positive analysis of Google's probable behavior, not a normative defense of it. From a free speech perspective it's unfortunate that so many content policies are ultimately advertising-driven, but advertisers are the ones paying for most of the platform (with the exception of subscribers like to YouTube Red which are probably a minority of users).
One example would be the Stop Funding Hate pressure group who very loudly and aggressively by social media, campaigns to companies to stop advertising within The Daily Mail newspaper in the UK.
This kind of an argument shows up every time Google or Facebook or some other megacorp does something detrimental to free speech. It would be a reasonable thing to say if they didn't control millions of conversations every day, show millions of ads to millions of people, and so on. When a company has a budget that would put it in the 20 biggest economies in the world if it were a country, this kind of a statement no longer applies. It doesn't matter that it's privately owned, its very existence impacts the lives of most people in most developed countries in the world, if it infringes on free speech, it should be regulated.
"Kids look, those are the pics of ICO craze 2018! Now get off my lawn"
What I find most disturbing are all the self-appointed "experts" who offer classes in which they will teach their "system" that they claim will guarantee the students collossal returns on very small investments.
However there are lots of ads that I'd like Facebook to keep. Many of the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) ads are from legitimate startup companies who hope to finance their new businesses by selling tokens at a fixed price for a limited period of time.
But I only want just the _legitimate_ ICO ads to remain. Unfortunately there are plenty of ICO scams. It can be quite difficult for a newbie to determine the difference.
I had a good experience with my first ICO - I bought NAGA at $1.00 then after it was listed with an exchange, I sold it at $3.00.
I have three other ICOs that I plan to hold until the companies behind them become profitable.
Note: "sold". I have a special hatred for the word "HODL".
There are other kinds of crypto advertising that I feel should remain. I'm very happy with my Bitmain Antminer L3+ LiteCoin mining rig.
Even with mining rigs there are scams: Etherium and Monero are both "ASIC resistant" because mining them requires quite a lot of memory. They both require GPUs.
In principle ASIC ETH or Monero ASIC mining is _possible_. I expect someone will eventually make ASICs with the required memory integrated into the chip.
But there are _no_ ETH or Monero ASIC rigs _yet_. Despite this, scammers are endlessly posting on message boards that their "company" - perhaps "shell company" is a better term - has ASIC Etherium rigs for sale.
Yes, it is, and you don't need the memory integrated into the chip
I‘m sorry to bring you the news, but there aren‘t any.
Oh, and just in case there are, the crypto ecosystem implosion happening this year will drag them along to the bottom of the pool together with all the scams.
The names that stay are those that speak for them self through revolutionizing Technologie.
How the hell can these companies turn blind eyes to bogus advertising like [1] to the point that the FTC steps in - but suddenly have a conscience about cryptocurrency.
It would please me to no end for advertising to magically become 100% truthful and fact-based. But this is selective censorship for reasons I don't care to understand, the ads these companies serve will continue to be rife with lies and propaganda with or without cryptocurrency.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_weird_trick_advertisements
There's probably a comprehensive list in the FTC documents, but the other articles cited by the wikipdia article make it sound like the ads were ubiquitous at the time, run on every major ad network.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/ubiquitous-ti...
Perhaps the intervention of the FTC lead to a change in organisational incentives that made the organisation more wary of allowing possibly-fraudulent ads.
The crypto litigation mass is approaching its Schwarzschild radius... By acting as a conduit for these ICO ads, Google etc. are making themselves part of the accretion disk arond the black hole, teeing up a decade of subpoenas, complaints, etc.
On one hand there are tokens and coins created with good intentions who will have to find other ways of marketing their values. On the other hand it prevents scam-coins like Bitconnect and DavorCoin from taking advantage of the less informed on a grand scale.
Did you see the "World's first blockchain currency for football"?
I see no issues here.
I have no proof of this, of course, but it's an obvious money laundering route. Costs are fairly minimal to generate a legitimate-sounding reason to have a bunch of crypto.
The thing is there still are many scams that are in plain sight, things like fad diets, weight loss products, and on and on.
I find it totally unacceptable for a third party to assume the role of babysitter for consenting adults.
In the same way we can think that most of the businesses are scams, because most of them end up bankrupt after 5 years. Should they also ban the ads for products of companies younger than 5 years? To protect the consumers from becoming bag holders of unsupported and unusable products?
Are you serious? Or is this sarcasm?
If you're serious: you're welcome of course to an opinion that google is right to block scams, and / or that most cryptocurrency ads are scams.
But you can't really believe that adults stop being adults, or that consent to judge the merits of, for example an ad, suddenly evaporates in the presence of a scam?
Is the presence of a scam sufficient to warrant treatment of the involved individuals like children?
That sounds like an awful world.
Go peddle your ponzi schemes somewhere else!
For those with their eyes open, this is just another example of the current authoritarian trend sweeping the globe.
Yes, google is a private company but so are bakers. Unless you subscribe to "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others".
By the way, there is no distinction here between public and private powers. The State needs these big corporations to extend itself and they in turn need the State to regulate competition out of the markets.
Case in point: Germany, 1933.
[1]https://www.recode.net/2017/1/25/14375750/google-adsense-adv...
[2]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/116271...
[3]https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180226/07321339304/secti...
[4]http://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/remove-terror-conte...
This reminds me of when newspapers wouldn't run my ads for internet sites back in the day.