Forbid advertisements.
We can't solve a political problem with purely technical solutions. We can provide workarounds for 5 to 10 years but the core problem has to be shut down at one point.
We can't solve a political problem with purely technical solutions. We can provide workarounds for 5 to 10 years but the core problem has to be shut down at one point.
Legislation-wise, I think the best the web can hope for is forcing websites to label ads. It doesn't sound unobtainable, especially as similar legislation already exists for political ads in many places. For example, legislation could require websites to label all ads with some kind of strictly defined watermark. In addition, some kind of software-readable indication would be required for accessibility purposes. Could be a special HTML tag or attribute. That would make ad blocking much easier.
The legislation would have to be very explicit about the format of the label and that it be machine readable, otherwise you'll get obfuscation like Facebook is doing:
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp...:
> This is not the first time Facebook has changed its code in a way that has broken our tool. For example, all ads are supposed to contain the word “sponsored” as part of a mandatory disclosure, so users can distinguish between ads and their friends’ posts. Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” Later, it also added an invisible “Sponsored” disclosure to posts from your friends. Many of the participants in our project noticed the effects of this change because it caused some menus to pop open unexpectedly or the page to scroll to the top repeatedly. Nowadays, the disclosure says “SpSpSononSsosoSredredSSS.” Some of these changes were likely also intended to thwart ad blockers.
I don't share your pessimism about the feasability of politically banning all advertising, but I agree that something like this would be the next best thing, and a great step.
Tracking technology and terrible analytics platforms that slow everything down are much lower hanging fruit.
It's like:
A: I don't like rain.
B: It's already raining.The only one I could find was related to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and of course GDPR, but that's related to handling of personal data.
If they said what they wanted to say, the law would essentially say "don't violate privacy without explicit consent." I'm relatively OK with that; that's not telling me how to build websites, that's just making certain harmful activities illegal. It wouldn't be very different from saying "don't distribute malware that attacks your users."
In its current form, I'm not too thrilled with the cookie law. And I sure as hell don't want lawmakers adding more, worse, laws on top of that. Go too far in that direction and they're turning software into nagware (I loathe cookie popups, I loathe google's "privacy reminder", I loathe applications that blast me with notifications and hints, I loathe permission dialogs, I like Unix's Rule of Silence) while making its development a legal minefield.
I want to be able to write FLOSS software (or websites) with a user interface that pleases me, and EU is looking for ways to make that illegal. In a manner of speaking, I hope they do just that, then people who want pleasant software have more reason to organize an underground software liberation movement where no fucks about shit laws are given.
>EU is looking for ways to make that illegal
I'm sorry, but what are you smoking? Willy nilly data collection is illegal, they don't say much about UI.
I'm glad I'm not the only one saying it in a thread, for once.
> We can't solve a political problem with purely technical solutions.
This is something that is sometimes hard to accept for the hacker mindset, but it's absolutely true and an important thing to realize.
Seeking change at a societal level is the exact opposite of the hacker's free-wheeling individualism, but it's the only way to actually accomplish change at a societal level.
You're right, we'll never change advertising just by running individual ad blockers, and we'll never change privacy controls by trying to mask our identities; that has to happen through laws and larger society. We have to have a right to privacy and freedom from advertising be a thing that everyone wants, the bus driver, the butcher, hair stylist, etc., not just what we can foist on our immediate family and social circle.
But... Ads are useful. I remember once maybe ten years ago when I noticed an ad about an event in a nearby library that was absolutely amazing and without ads I would not have been there.
(This is sarcasm. There is no reason why manipulating other people to do things should not be regulated heavily.)
That said, I wish digital media stopped wholesale delegating the work of serving ads to third parties and had proper control over experience and privacy—what is delivered how and who tracks whom.
The web has taken an industry that already had reputation for deceptive tactics and have handed them tremendous powers through data collection.
Should advertising be banned because of that? I doubt that it would be effective since the advertising industry has created an environment where tracking people is the norm. Banning advertising would simply shift the focus of that data collection so that it is less visible.
It would also be incredibly difficult to ban advertising. Legislation would have to create a clear definition of what advertising is and deal with a medium and business world that crosses national borders. If you don't consider the former, such legislation would have unintended consequences of the freedom of speech. In the case of the latter, it would be far more difficult to reach international agreements than with other online regulations (regulations that are already difficult to enforce) since advertising is considered legitimate in many cases while standards for advertising will differ.
Without ads there would be basically no free content online, and those who cannot afford content would simply go without. Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. To yank that away seems like bringing a dark age.
Citation needed. I don't believe that for one moment. Already people are producing far more content for free each second than one person could ever consume in a lifetime on sites like Youtube and Instagram. The urge is there, even without any monetary reward.
> Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information.
Now consider how much worse the world has become due to the incentive to hide wanted information behind commercial information. Simple example: there was a time before adblockers when it was not a rare sight to have a page with 80% advertising and 20% actual content. Think unskippable ads before videos. Think of the mountains of useless content that SEO spam produces that hide the interesting pages in search engines.
Marketing does not give access to information. On the contrary, it takes it away.
We’re seeing it already. Many if not most news sites are pay gating their once free content. Cite: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The New Yorker. All charge for access. All we’re free before the proliferation of ad blockers.
Yes there would be hobbyist information for free, but WebMD? News sites in general? Any sort of resource that takes money to pay people to maintain? It will all be pay gated.
As someone who does not use an adblocker, I have genuinely no problems finding the content I’m looking for.
See? They found a way to put content online without relying on ads.
Before Youtube, Facebook and the like, internet service providers included basic means of publication. Mail/mailing lists, homepages/blogs with RSS. They could do that again.
But, even if the barrier to publishing became higher and only 1/50th of the video's were put up on Youtube, it would still be far more than anyone could ever consume.
There was plenty of free content online before ads, in fact I claim that the web was better before ads arrived, and it is getting worse by the day. Marketeers ruined it.
It happens over and over. YouTube had plenty of great content for free before monetization. Now it is becoming worse by the day, because everything is ad-related. "Influencers", etc.
> Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. To yank that away seems like bringing a dark age.
Easy access to information is a consequence of the Internet and then the Web, both technologies having been developed by government-funded programs, respectively in the US and in the EU.
Ads brought us re-centraliztion, targeting and erosion of democracy through extreme polarization and fake news.
I know this is hard to believe for a lot of people here, but human beings are motivated by many things other than monetary profit.
This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is.
Yes there was. Go to archive.org and check for yourself.
> The commercial internet is a trillion times bigger than anything that came before and services billions of users around the world, many for free, paid for by ads.
Bigger doesn't mean better. The web is now flooded with malicious and manipulative content. The ads pay for that content, while taxpayers and consumers pay for the infrastructure that actually makes the Internet possible. Ads pay to keep the web centralized, they don't pay for what makes the web possible.
> This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is.
There is indeed, but notice that I did not say that "everything was somehow better in the good old days". I made a very specific comment about a very specific topic. My comment: there was plenty of quality content on the web before ads arrived. Ads made the web worse. Argue against this if you like, but not about things I did not claim.
That there's more content for more people across more channels is objectively true, and advertising pays for much of it. You seem to be conflating ad UX with economics.
It is the medium that makes the ads possible, and it is payed by you and me.
> We're talking about content, and ads are the subsidy that lets billions consume for free.
And I have been telling you every step of the way that there was good content before the ads arrived.
> That there's more content for more people across more channels is objectively true,
That is hardly surprising. There was no moment in the history of the web when the total amount of content available was not increasing. This was already the case before the ads.
Did it grown more than it would have without ads? Maybe. Is it better? I don't think so.
> and advertising pays for much of it.
And yet here you are, consuming content that someone created for free (me) in a platform without ads (Hacker News). So it doesn't pay for all of it, and even you, at least sometimes, seem to prefer the non-ad-funded corner.
> You seem to be conflating ad UX with economics.
Sorry, I have no idea what you mean by this.
Literally the only site that is better now than back then is YouTube with an ad-blocker.
Everything else has deteriorated: Google (search) is worse, Ebay is worse, Amazon is worse, banking sites are worse.
Heck, even Java stock tickers from 2000 were better than now.
The art of presenting information in a meaningful way has been lost entirely.
Restricting the legality of advertisements in general might have the nice effect of leveling the playing field, by making it harder for content providers to benefit by-generally covertly-selling out their users (or their users' interests) to such third parties.
Before Youtube, we were sharing files directly. There was far more content online!
This may just be some inevitable fact about humanity. We’ve seen this sort of regulation and ultimate centralization of every single communications medium going back to the printing press. When I was younger, I legitimately believed the web would be different. I thought it would be a decentralizing, democratizing force for peace in the world. Now it seems destined to be the opposite of those things: a centralized tool for polarization and control.
There are even advertisements in North Korea (for the ruling party).
This idea isn’t realistic.
Saying a thing always existed is a pretty bad argument to keep it alive.
For example, where is the difference between me talking about a game I like to play and someone talking about a game they like to pay that they were given a free copy to play?
I think looking at forbidding tracking is a better path to pursue. Or maybe making someone legally responsible for their ad codes as if they knowingly placed it there.
And before you claim it’s a bad ruling, think about all the times you’ve used your money. Are you not supporting the EFF in some form of speech by donating to them? Are you not supporting a product in some form by buying it? I don’t like it as it allows money in politics, but it’s a ruling that makes sense.
No, "speech" is something, that you can argue extend to written declarations and publications, but "paying someone to support their actions" is something different. It is something that can be used to promote a political expression and it makes some sense to protect some form of it but certainly not on the same grounds as protecting free speech.
Paying someone to put forward an opinion has other names: corruption, lobbying and, yes, advertisement. None of them should be practice protected under freedom of expression laws.
See, why is freedom of expression good? Because of the core philosophical belief that truth and good opinion emerge from the confrontation of different point of views. Alvin tells me why we should not bomb Eastasia, Barbara tells me why we should. Charles comes with additional facts. Daniele points out some lies and incoherence in some of the past arguments. They all make their points, then I think for myself to make my opinion.
This is how opinions of voters but also lawmakers, leaders, journalists, magistrates, citizens are supposed to be formed.
In no way would this process be helped by paying the person that is forming their opinion. Quite the contrary.
So yes, this ruling was bad. Incredibly bad. It is bad for philosophical, moral, practical reasons.
The fact that I should be allowed to donate to EFF does not rely on the 2nd amendment. And in fact I do want the law to forbid me to give 10 millions to the EFF to drop a lawsuit that would go against my interests.
Some bad or annoying ads on the web is not cause to forbid advertisements and completely misses all the content that it pays for.
I hear that a lot but historically, we've seen a lot of the opposite, a lot of political problems were solved with technical solutions. Technology so far had an even bigger impact than politics on society.
Technology can enable a political will and can create an opportunity for change, but if the political will goes in one direction, no amount of tech will be able to resist it forever.
We could ban ads easily with a law. It would not need any tech. Scrubbing all the ads while there are incentives to develop them, however, is a lost fight.
How would one formalize what's an ad and what's not? And what about sneaky things like sponsored content or, say, amazon reviews? It's hard sometimes to tell whether a review is legitimate or an ad in disguise.
"Did you receive compensation to say good things about this product?"
Yes: corruption.
No: you're clear.