"Targeted" advertising generally refers to the tracking-based targeting of individual people. Re-defining the term to include all types of advertising makes the term mostly useless.
> Doesn't seem feasible.
Banning targeted advertising would be easy with legislation that bans tracking and showing ads to individuals.
> You'd have to make people randomly choose advertising spots from all of media.
Traditional advertising methods worked fine for centuries. Nobody[1] places ads randomly; you advertise where your product's audience will see it.
[1] Advertising intended to build general brand awareness instead of selling a specific product or service might buy ads somewhat randomly, because the goal is simply getting the brand name seen widely and often.
So no, targeted advertising is not any ad with a target in mind, that is just advertising. Targeted ads are distinguished from regular ads based on targeting a specific individual. An ad in the WSJ may be aimed at a broad category of people interested in business news, but if I know for a fact that 'Letmesleep69' happens to be a reader of that paper and I take out an ad that specifically refers to that user name, then it would be a targeted ad.
edit: formatting
Disclosure: I believe in the eventual success of the fediverse.
> Seems impossible without outlawing all advertising. Advertising in the nytimes over some other paper or advertising on fox over cnn are all examples of targeted advertising. You'd have to make people randomly choose advertising spots from all of media. Doesn't seem feasible.
Not the OP, but I think he has a good idea stated over-broadly. Let me fix it:
A lot would be solved by outlawing profile-based targeted advertising.
If Facebook can't use you profile to individually target you, the advertisers are left to target the mass of "Facebook users" like they target the mass of "NY Times readers."
I should have added "by default" to my sentence.
Obamacare was intended to be like this. Legislators knew it was going to get attacked the second the ink was dry, so they built in a bunch of clauses making it extremely difficult to 'simply repeal'. New health care legislation almost certainly has to build on top of Obamacare, enough political capital can't possibly be raised to do anything else.
Preventing third party sources (images, scripts, "share buttons" etc.) from issuing or checking browser cookies might break a whole pile of useful things, but it'd make the world of retargeted ads dry up quickly.