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Comment by notRobot | Hacker News Reader

I wonder, how would the world be different if a major government was to completely ban user tracking? Ad companies would be forced to use contextual advertising. How would that play out?

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I had a different idea, which was that governments of the future could ban advertising altogether.

I know it's a... stretch, but imagine this: - you can't put billboards in the city - you can't place any images, text, etc. banners anywhere (except for tightly controlled, single-design descriptions of businesses in buildings, decided by each municipality like it's already done in some cities to maintain consistent look of historical town centers) - in general, no publicly visible ads of any kind are allowed - no ads in videos, TV, etc.

Where would ads be? - you can search for ads like you do today, in search engines (preferably opt in), i.e. ads become a catalogue, not a "here I am" attention grabber - gray line (recommendations/suggestions which really are ads would need to be limited/removed as well) to be decided

In general, clear up public space and attention holding spaces from explicit commercial interests as much as possible.

I'd love to live a few years in such a world and see whether value propositions of businesses would start shifting...

I grew up in a place like this. It was very nice, honestly. It was possible to attain inner peace and quiet while being out in the street and not be disturbed by something one would consider intentionally intrusive for minutes or even hours at a time.

As a slight tangent, there have been restrictions on advertising that might affect views from the River Thames in London that date back more than 100 years. In an effort to circumvent these restrictions, a company name was incorporated into brickwork features of what's known as the "Oxo Tower" - Oxo being a brand of stock cubes.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxo_Tower#History

There have been cities that have banned all forms of outdoor advertising (such as billboards)! Here's some links you might like:

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...

https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/adblocking-the-globa...

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-ki...

A gallary of Tokyo stripped of advertising: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2015/aug/12/tokyo...

Wow, I never knew, thank you. These pictures look lovely, now in space like this one might actually focus :)

You would end up stalling the development of new products. I can't invent and sell an 800 usd massage chair if people assume they cost 5000 usd and so don't even go looking for them.

I can't start a "we are cheaper than wallmart" discount business without advertising this fact.

You need advertisements, or something like that, to encourage new products and price competition.

You do not need tracking for any reason since you can advertise against the content of the article, video or podcast. If I am reading up about apartment prices in AREA, serve me suggestions based on that.

Targted ads don't work.

That's a nice theory but doesn't mirror my experience. Online ads will be for overpriced junk, when it's not literal scams.

The reason is it's all highest bidder, no quality control. If there was an ad network with a brand, with a reputation for only running ads for high quality products at competitive prices, then maybe I'd pay attention.

EDIT: Writing this comment made me consciously pay attention to ads to verify my thesis, but honestly the quality was better than I expected.

Yes, it would stall development of a lot of business. Many of these businesses are not necessary. Humans would start a different path of looking for what's actually useful rather than falling for what's out there -- or at least that's the dream :)

[edit] Onto your second point, that you need ads to promote price competition, I don't think so. There's almost no advertisement in many kinds of services like e.g. hair salons, but they still very much compete (price included). Also, huge majority of professional trainers do not advertise anywhere in my area, and yet we all compete on price and our customers know the range of prices that are reasonable. So information about price etc. flows quite well regardless of ads.

There is an honest need in here, to surface unknown unknowns within the world's of consumer producta/services. It could be solved by a trade show/business fair kind of thing (maybe we would know we had solved it when B2C looked like B2B)

The thing is, advertising does not efficiently suggest products/services now, so the idea that removing it would hurt customers ability to find what they want is a little melodramatic

There is plenty of price comparison websites that one can use right now that allow one to search for a specific product and compare price offers.

One would search for a massage chair on there and find that some are cheaper than others and read the reviews to make an educated guess about whether the extra price is worth it.

So, still ads but different name. These price engines (every one I've seen) are all affiliate hubs; they list only products that pay for the click. Any reviews on such sites are biased in similar ways to the gaming in reviews in major sites like Amazon.

Now, one could say, "so what? Most folks know that, useful info still, and it's better than ads!". But is it? At least the ad is an overt block of color, but affiliate links are hidden behind redirects and tiny disclaimers (in the few regions that require disclosure).

It's fine (and easy) to complain about display ads or video ads, but there's a lot more. Product brand shown or mentioned in tv or movie:ad. Movie trailers: yep, ad. Public media mentioning a sponsor: ad. That tiktok or insta person who always has branded product in the frame? ad.

In fact, most product discovery comes from ads. Is there another way? Probably, but ads have worked better than any other approach for so long, we haven't beaten it yet. I hope we do, but til then, for every 100 ads I despise, I'm still happy I found that one thing I actually liked. Can't say that defends all ads, but it gives me hope that we can find a good middle spot.

It depends who's paying. If the product seller pays then it's an advert. If the product buyer pays it's not. The difference in economic incentives is... stark.

Ad supported media has a similarly skewed structure. If I'm paying for media I better like it. If adverts pay for it, the key is lots of people spend lots of time looking at it.

There is a difference between advertising and product distribution.

I haven’t heard anyone suggest we ban distributors.

I still say that there should be a .adv TLD, and any paid advertising goes on either the manufacturer's site or in a .adv page, nowhere else.

.adv would be the internet catalog (good or bad, awesome shopping resource or godawful bag of crap, as may be) and all other TLDs (even .com) will be free of ads. Period.

My point, is that you wouldn't do that if you thought the price was around 5k.

But then take the example of new technology: you wouldn't want to buy gore-tex shoes, which would be more expensive than the others, if you didn't know that they were both waterproof and breathable, something you would consider impossible before seeing the ad.

Apples M1 is a more recent example: until their marketing/pr blitz hit I couldn't buy a fanless laptop with anywhere decent performance and so because I didn't know it existed, I wouldn't have gone to search for it.

You can run a price comparison website for know old things, e.g I use them when I am after something specific.

Of course that leaves me the problem of which price comparison site I should use.

If enough people abandon cities I could see this happening. Imagine how much it would cost to engage a marketing company to put your BS "message" onto a billboard and have enough people see it. Imagine too all of the added compliance costs that would come with having to deal with dozens of small municipalities, each with their own quirky laws.

That sounds like a nightmare. Cities are not perfect but they're amazing for a million reasons. Civilization started with agriculture and then with cities.

There are big cities, see the comments above yours, where billboards are banned or strictly limited.

There's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I wish you could think a bit before writing such thing.

How do you decide what is an ad and what is not an ad? What if I tell my friend, that my new TV is really good? What if I tell it to 10 of my friends? What if I send an email to everyone I know, saying, that my new TV is great?

Would you investigate, if the TV manufacturer paid me or not? How exactly would you do it? Or did they gave me a discount on the TV?

I wish you could see, that you can not ban advertising, without banning free speech.

It would be also great to ban lying in media, right?

Well, you're not a billboard, or any other fixed sign broadcasting to everyone that walks by, or pushing your opinion at literally everyone you meet, so while you may have an opinion, it's not being forced on everyone who comes in proximity to you.

As opposed to the billboards, building side adverts, and web site ads that are just splatting out at anyone that happens by.

My idea for this is that we should nationalise advertising & product discovery.

Over consumption is killing the planet, processed foods are destroying our health, user engagement hacking is eroding free will.

Powerful companies like HSBC manipulate the press through the pressure of their ad-spend. [1]

But obviously we can't just see the vast advertising industry and all it supports vanish overnight. However, we could nationalize them. We could pay last years ad-spend to market healthy food, low consumption & social connections. Then next year we could cut spending a little, say 90%. If companies can't survive without the economic dead weight of advertising then they shouldn't exist. It's not like they're required for product discovery in the information technology age.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-t...

My city (Overland Park, Kansas) definitely has some sort of restrictions on billboards [0]. I looked it up, if you're super interested on page 230 it indicates that there's a density restriction (1200 feet from already existing billboards) and a zoning restriction against residential (400 feet). They also can't be on top of a building, or over 30 feet tall.

I can't really think of any billboards nearby, so I think this effectively restricts the billboards to maybe very busy interstates and nowhere else. Going across state lines into Missouri is very noticeable because there's billboards everywhere.

[0] http://online.encodeplus.com/regs/overlandpark-ks/export2doc...

I think one of the reasons for user tracking is fraud detection. The moment you get rid off it, nobody would be willing to "risk" advertising on smaller, unknown websites. So maybe such ban would make monetization for small publishers much harder.

Fraud is only a problem for advertisements based on CPM/CPC. Time-based advertisements (pay X to have your ad displayed here for Y time) tracked by overall purchases (using an unique link) don't have a "fraud" problem given that the only way to boost the ad's effectiveness is to literally buy the product multiple times and pay for it.

I despair it will be the opposite. To enhance revenues in the face of recent unexpected expenses due to global pandemic, government will embrace advertising to enhance revenues. Not just government web sites, but all government communications and services. Finding the right line to fill in when completing your tax form will become a game of Where's Waldo among the print ads. Want to see the beauty of a national park... it's right there behind the electronic billboards taking advantage of the proximity detectors in your phone and linked to user tracking.

There is too much lucre at stake for the government to be allowed to regulate. The government is vulnerable and needs to be supported by the advertising lobby. After all, it's what they do.

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