Just ban all ad tech while you’re at it. No one will miss it.
Efficiency in advertising, measured from the POV of profit made by advertisers, is not a good thing for people at large.
Why? Sorry this statement is not self evident. If I have the perfect ad system, that only targets people who will buy my product at 100% rate and no one else, why is that not a good thing for people at large?
Efficiency from advertiser's point of view is showing ads to people who would buy the things advertised, as in the case above but also including when customers don't need them, can't afford them, when they are actively harmful (say gambling ads for gambling addicts), shown at the most psychologically effective times (when you are vulnerable, desperate, not thinking clearly, etc).
There is a small overlap in those two cases, but the money is on the harmful end.
I agree psychological tricks can be used by advertising ("one weird trick to...") but it's not a major practice to advertise when they are vulnerable.
> don't need 90% of what we buy are not necessities. So this is not just a problem for advertising but for 90% of what we produce. It's okay for people to buy (and advertise) things that they want, not need. In the modern era, we have wealth way beyond covering necessities.
> can't afford them is this a problem with advertising or people's finical responsibility?
> they are actively harmful Is advertising the problem here? If a product or service is actively harmful, why is it legal? Or you prefer a system where there are legal harmful products, but we just can't talk about them?
It seems there are businesses that are bad (or you don't agree with), but you are projecting advertising as the root of the problem. Maybe consider it's the core business you don't like?
That might be a current technical limitation, I'm sure facebook is working on that as we speak. A breakthrough or two in psychology, some improvements in data gathering and crunching, and no user would have a chance against professionals whose job it is to find what exactly to show and when to induce that sale. Humans generally can't exactly install firewalls in their heads and keep it up to date, not against a motivated onslaught.
> can't afford them is this a problem with advertising or people's finical responsibility?
With truly effective persuasion techniques, lines of 'responsibility' will become gray. If you drive through and intersection and somebody shone a bright light and blinded you temporarily, are you responsible for the accident? If you go about your day and somebody distracted you while their partner pick-pocketed your wallet, are you responsible for not guarding your valuables? If herbalife salesman cornered you in a coffee shop and (using half-truths, exaggerations, outrageous promises, pushing on your greed and confusion, social proofs and other sales-fu) sold you a garage-full of product, are you responsible of that mistake?
Um, I was going to create a series of less and less clear-cut examples, but run out of imagination, hopefully idea is legible.
> It seems there are businesses that are bad (or you don't agree with), but you are projecting advertising as the root of the problem.
I'm sure I was imagining worst examples when writing that, but incentives mostly push towards selling more of the stuff you make, regardless of its effect, even for benign businesses. There are exceptions I'm sure, but I expect they are driven by external forces -- regulations, owner's direction that is not profit related, etc.
In presence of truly effective ad tech and barring any friction (like regulation, social blowback, etc), actors who use it will eat those who don't. Markets are red in tooth and nail.
Release the hypnodrones!
'UnFleshedOne described what I meant in a parallel comment.
That cost is being passed down to consumers. So by getting rid of all advertising everybody would see bigger margins and can cut prices.
Assuming ad tech makes advertising more effective, banning it would make challenging a market incumbent more difficult. You'd need to burn more cash to teach more consumers about your product, a larger fraction of whom would be outside your target market.
Granted, ad tech does not always add value. And there is a legitimate question as to the trade-off between privacy and consumer prices. But the tradeoff exists. Reducing the threat of new entrants means incumbents will raise prices.
An intermediary doesn't need to know me so they can profit from selling my existence and desires to a 3rd party at the drop of a hat.
This assumes "ad tech" == "internet wide surveillance". That is certainly the most profitable subset, but it is still just a subset. Something needs to serve those ads and make sure they are relevant to the content they are shown with, even if it exclusively uses the context of the specific page being loaded. Something needs to manage campaign tracking to know which specific sites or which specific ad copy is driving users in, even if no information about the users themselves is captured. Something needs to manage the connections between the ad copy and the site being advertised, both to ensure users go to the place they are supposed to and to combat malicious or hijacked ads.
All of this is "ad tech". Even if you think we should return exclusively to the days of random, untracked banner ads some amount of ad tech is necessary.
No, it doesn't. If you have three pipelines between points A and B, removing one of them will raise downstream prices. It doesn't matter that there are two others. Removing an option will increase the cost of the others, even assuming equal effectiveness.
A similar argument could apply to cut the entire advertising industry down to mail-order catalogs and trade shows, which is something I'd like to see happening.
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[0] - Except the Sentinelese, I guess.
I don’t buy many of the “costs will be passed on to consumers” arguments against regulation. If you assume companies already price things efficiently to maximize profit, then they cannot raise prices any further and make more money.
By your argument, taxing a transaction in a market would not ever raise the price charged to the demand side. It's pretty easy to see by reading a chapter about tax incidence (which is different from where the tax is legally placed) and elasticities of supply/demand curves that this is definitely false (not just in theory, but also in practice)
That doesn't seem obvious to me. Why would it not make it more difficult for the incumbents relative to the upstarts?
Users that already pay for these services for this exact reason shouldn't be impacted, but it will impact other services that people consider "free", I would imagine.