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Comment by cf141q5325 | Hacker News Reader

There are however limits if you dont want a dysfunctional bureaucracy try to micromanage you. You will always have especially vulnerable sections of society (kids, addicts ...), but you still cant treat everyone like that. Especially as wanting something to be fixed doesnt influence how fixable it is. Ads are of course a giant security risk, but its a very profitable one. At best any solution coming through such a bureaucracy will in essence create monopolies that can afford regulatory capture and security theater.

This is really "our" problem. If the audience here doesnt find fixes its unrealistic to expect that of regulators. This is a systemic issue caused by the economic structure that cant be fixed by yet another law.

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>but its a very profitable one.

If everyone blocked ads then it wouldn't be so profitable. The reason it's so profitable is that very few internet users actually have ad-blockers in place.

Your point of this requiring user action matches my point exactly.

There is a giant industry here. Any attempt at top down regulation will fail at that and get either regulatory captured or poked holes through for the big players.

Ad-tech is exclusively big players already anyway: Google & Meta. Let me play you the world's smallest violin for them.

And it's not like ad-tech is an important industry that's mandatory for a healthy society like healthcare, energy, transportations, education, environment, agriculture, etc. We can easily survive without them being so wealthy and powerful. We might even be in a happier place with them defanged, even if their shareholders wouldn't.

> Let me play you the world's smallest violin for them.

You miss my point completely and i am unsure how to reword it.

Yes they are exclusively big players already, thats why it wont work through top down regulation and requires user action.

We might be better off without them, but i dont see how that could ever happen through top down regulation. The economic and political incentives are way to strong and bureaucracies way to unwilling and incompetent. You cant destroy such profitable business models through regulation, they have to much pull here. At best you get regulatory capture. It will be another iteration of "safe/privacy on paper" allowing for higher profits and more entrenched monopolies for said megacorps.

Intention is not a valid metric, outcome is.

>thats why it wont work through top down regulation and requires user action

Wrong. Top down regulations definitely work. :laughs-in-EU: That's how we banned Apple's proprietary connector, ICE car sales starting 2030, and how (for better or worse) some countries banned nuclear. What makes you think we can't ban targeted ad-tech the same way?

There just isn't the political will behind it like it is on things like ICE cars or nuclear energy, because unlike the latter things, the politicians and voters don't understand it well enough to be outraged about it, so they keep slipping under the radar for now, but there's no guarantee this will go on forever.

Just realized we are having the same conversation twice. My bad. Pls see the other post, you cant actually nuke segments of the GDP, your examples function as economic drivers.

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