> This is not a real choice made by citizens
This is something which courts should consider more about other things, such as EULA and Terms and Conditions. Same reasons.
This is something which courts should consider more about other things, such as EULA and Terms and Conditions. Same reasons.
Given that ~98% of Internet users couldn't even articulate what javascript does as part of their browsing experience, the exfiltration and reassembling of their PII via meta-data into sellable profiles for targeted auctions is completely beyond their capacity to comprehend or engage with. Thus consent is de facto ungrantable.
The real solution would be to make users pay for the content, but charging for something that users used to get for "free" is also essentially impossible.
Right now why would you spend money on untargeted ads when you have better options.
Targeted ads are always dumb as they tend to push an item that you've looked into before purchasing, but never realize that item has been purchased and you are no longer interested. They never get that the person researched item but has not looked for some time for item. Let's now advertise accessories for that item. If it was a fridge, show stainless cleaning items, for dishwasher, show ads for different detergents or other kitchen related items. It's not hard. For whatever reasons, they can't do targeted well. Targeted doesn't work as advertised.
If targeted advertising, as a whole, is banned, you can be pretty damn sure the payout for untargeted will come up—not necessarily to match what targeted is now, but way more than that 10% figure.
Ad spend, in aggregate, doesn't change that much based on new "innovations" in advertising annoyance. If you've still got roughly the same amount of money being spent on untargeted ads, continent-wide, as you do now on targeted, they're going to pay out much closer to parity.
I'd like to see the source of that claim.
E.g. this particular study claims almost the exact opposite: "Targeted ads need to be 100% to 700% more efficient than regular ads to be as profitable": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016781162...
This could well be true. Unless targeted ads are just flat out banned, at which point the profitability of untargeted ones will rise, as the air (user attention, available space in web pages) is no longer being sucked out of the room by targeted ones.
Also - if by untargeted you mean completely randomly chosen ones, there absolutely is a happy medium - choose them based on the content of the page (I'm browsing for baby wipes and formula? Show me ads for strollers and child car seats, and maybe earplugs and some gift ideas for infants, not for motor oil or landscaping or circular saws). I don't buy the excuse that they are so much less effective - especially if the personally targeted ones are out of the picture.
As a huge bonus, they are comparatively trivial to implement and would provide a way out of the current monopoly were only Google, Facebook and a handful of other "know" what to show you and everyone must make these few greedy incumbents even richer by advertising through them. This would also help fragment what information exists about your habits, so even actors determined to break the law would get less advantages by doing so.
They literally did. With GDPR. The poor struggling advertisers came up with the cookie banners they blamed on the EU.
Oh no, cried the publishers. How can we ever live without storing all of user data for a decade or more? https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
The internet made information a commodity, and how we collectively pay for that information is still an open question 3 decades in.
It's easy to say people want content "without ads," but there are also plenty who don't want to buy a membership to every single provider either.
corporations have enough money to tie you up in court with lawyers.
I'd expect a situation like Somerset v Stewart. Mansfield clearly didn't want to rule you can't have slavery because that's going to be extremely disruptive to powerful people - so he suggests they settle and then the case goes away and he isn't called to say anything. But Stewart refuses to settle, apparently nobody could convince him that it's in his best interest - so, OK says Mansfield: fiat justitia, ruat cælum (Justice be done though the heavens fall). Somerset walks free.
Are corporations relying on EULAs smart enough to take the L? I guess we'd see.
There is a very clear law that forbids any additional contract terms post the point of sale, so that if you go to a store, purchase a box with software in it and then go home to install it, when it pops up a dialog for you to "agree" on, you can just ignore it, nothing in that is enforceable at all. And no, small print text on the box that says you have to agree to terms in the software does not change anything. But that's not how software is sold anymore.
EULAs in general are not unenforceable, so long as they are presented before the sale. This is precisely why Steam (for example) now gives you the EULA before it lets you buy anything.
So for example, in Germany, an EULA would be considered an AGB, and subject to §303 BGB and following paragraphs, which e.g. means, "surprising" clauses which you cannot reasonably expect beforehand being part of the EULA would be unenforcable or §307 BGB would make certain kinds of one-sided/lop-sided clauses unenforcable.
Other EU countries might have other laws. I'm not really sure this is an area of unification, and a lot of the commonalities there is might be more due to the common heritage of Napoleon's Code Civil which underlies contract law in many european countries, instead of EU unification efforts.