How will you ban that without infringing on free speech. That is a thing in the US and a lot of countries outside the EU.
The product is the same as the speech, whereas in advertising the speech is in sycophantic service of another product.
Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs. When people learn that their neighbors are paying less they will be naturally incentivized to investigate why. Equivalent problems can be solved with the same general technique.
Now all of the "brought to you by America's <industry group>" ads are back in. So is every pharma ad and every other patented product because they don't have to tell you a brand when there is only one producer.
> The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs.
Publication where? In the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"? Also, who decides to publish it, decides what it will say or pays the costs of writing and distributing it?
No, but they can convince a disinterested party that people aren't aware of <fact about industry that industry wants people to know> because that's actually true.
> Minimum competition requirements can be imposed.
But that brings back the original problem. Company invents new patented invention, how does anybody find out about it?
> a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.
This is the legislator's fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this.
If a proposal is full of problems and holes, the alternative isn't necessarily to do nothing, but rather to find a different approach to the problem.
Proposals that are full of holes are often worse than nothing, because the costs are evaluated in comparison to the ostensible benefit, but then in practice you get only a fraction of the benefit because of the holes. And then people say "well a little is better than nothing" while not accounting for the fact that weighing all of the costs against only a fraction of the benefit has left you underwater.
But I acknowledge that there may be edge cases. My point is that the existence of edge cases does not mean we should permit the harm to continue. Those specific edge cases can be identified and patched. My suggestion is a hypothetical example of a potential such patch, one that might possibly be a net benefit. Maybe it would actually be a net harm, and the restriction should be absolute. The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.
Your objections to this hypothetical example are nit-picking the edge cases of an edge case. They're so insignificant in comparison to the potential harm reduction of preventing advertising that they can be safely ignored.
> The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.
Only it turned out to be an example to illustrate how patching the edge cases might be a quagmire.
The same legit things that can cause them to realize it today. Word of mouth, a product review, a personal search that landed them on a new company website, a curated catalog (as long as those things are not selling their placements).
An ad is the worse thing to find such things out - the huge majority ranges from misleading to criminally misleading to bullshit.
We can have word of mouth, genuine, in forums and social media.
We can have reviews, genuine, in websites.
We can have websites which present new products and business, not as paid sponsorships.
We can search on our own initiative and go to their website.
We can have online catalogs.
And tons of other ways.
Making global business harder and forcing things more local actually sounds like a great benefit.
We could use less 1T companies and more a few billion or 100s of millions level companies too. I miss the "focused on Mac and iPod" era Apple.
The idea that we should eliminate that because a higher-income bracket of consumers is inconvenienced by ads just comes across oddly haughty and privelaged to me.
Heck, I wouldn't have my successful career today if it wasn't for the ad-supported ISP NetZero CD I came stumbled upon in 1999.
The follow industry conventions, visit registries of industry websites, have professional lists where companies submit their announcements (and not to the general public) and so on.
>Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.
If advertising is banned, it will work just as good as for any competitor.
Many don't think businesses should exist in the first place.
That won't convince anyone.
If you remove the ability for these people to advertise there goes their livelihood. I understand the desire to want to punish big evil corporations but all this will do is strengthen them because they're the ones who have enough capital to survive something like this and scoop up the marketshare left behind by the millions of small businesses that will fail when this is implemented.
but you can help this by banning all forms of active tracking.
Static ads only, no click tracking, and complete ban on profiling clients and especially on adjusting prices based on client/possible client behavior patterns.
Websites can too.
If you know the kind of articles your readers like, you can find ads that your readers will like.
Pervasive surveillance to make a system that's practically worse than the alternative that doesn't require mass surveillance, and is much simpler and cheaper. Did I say amusing before? Depressing is probably a better fit.
To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in technical legal disputes and still hasn't happened, despite the 2009 Lisbon Treaty mandating it.
The US First Amendment has no exceptions as worded, but the US Supreme Court has read some into it. The Convention has exceptions listed in the text, although they are vaguely defined – but like the US, the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive case law on the scope of those exceptions.
The big difference in practice is the US exceptions end up being significantly more narrow than those in Europe. However, given in both, the details of the exceptions are in case law – courts can and do change their mind, so this difference could potentially change (either by narrowing or broadening) in the decades to come.
> "Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
In the 2015 case Perinçek v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights applied Article 10 to find against a Swiss law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Can you imagine a Soviet court ever striking down a genocide denial law?
The decision is controversial because it introduces a double standard into the Court's case law – it had previously upheld laws criminalising Holocaust denial, now it sought to distinguish the Holocaust from the Armenian genocide in a way many find arbitrary and distasteful – the consistent thing would be to either allow denying both or disallow denying both.
But still, it just shows how mistaken your Soviet comparison is.
You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity.
The FCC regulates airwaves (and thus broadcast stations/networks), because the broadcast spectrum is a shared resource with bandwidth limits. The FCC similarly regulates cable television systems. The FCC does not regulate cable-only television networks.
Conflating advertising with free speech is like conflating sex work with reproductive rights.
The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market power over the distribution channel so that you're paying them a premium over competing distributors. But then wouldn't the best way to prevent them from extracting that premium to be to make it so nobody has exclusive control over distribution channels, e.g. by breaking up concentrated markets or requiring federated protocols?
In any case it's trivial to come up with such a definition that covers most cases. Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. Laws can be supplemented and ammended.
We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it.
> We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective. I'd take a relative improvement even if it's not 100% over free reign.
>You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
I don't consider it a "hopeless disaster" (except in it's effects on society). As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations. The existence of dark illegal versions of it, or exploitation in the industry, doesn't negate this.
For the most part they're trash. There is a narrow range of effectiveness where the cost of compliance is low and thereby can be exceeded by the expected cost of reasonable penalties imposed at something significantly less than 100% effective enforcement, e.g. essentially all gas stations stopped selling leaded gasoline because unleaded gasoline isn't that much more expensive.
The cost of complying with a ban on advertising is high, so the amount of effort that will be put into bypassing it will be high, which is the situation where that doesn't work.
> As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations.
It essentially bifurcated content creation and distribution into "this is 100% porn" and "this company will not produce or carry anything that would cause it to have to comply with those rules" which inhibits quality for anything that has to go in the "porn" box and pressures anything in the "not porn" box to be sufficiently nerfed that they don't have to hire more lawyers.
The combination of "most human communication now happens via social media" and "expressing your own sexuality is effectively banned on most major social media platforms" is probably a significant contributor to the fact that people are having less sex now and the fertility rate is continuing to decline. "All the boobs you could ever possibly look at but only on the sites where there is no one you will ever marry" is not a super great way to split up the internet.
The ambiguity in the definition frequently causes people to be harassed or subject to legal risk when doing sex education, anatomy, etc. when they're trying to operate openly with a physical presence in a relevant jurisdiction. Conversely, it's the internet and it's global so every terrible thing you'd want to protect anyone from is all still out there and most of the rules are imposing useless costs for no benefits, or worse, causing things to end up in places where there are no rules, not even the ones that have nothing to do with sex.
It's now being used as an guise to extract ID from everyone for surveillance purposes.
It's a solid example of bad regulations setting fire to the omnishambles.
Yes. You self host it as a company, and it can only be reproduced (if they wish) in outlets (say review sites) when there's no payment or compensation of any kind involved for that.
You have your own website and your copy on it. Don't start that "but if you pay some hosting provider to host that website that would be advertising", or the
"And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that."
that borders on being obtuse on purpose.
Yes. You're still allowed to pay someone - for YOUR OWN corporate website. Still your copy is not on my fucking social media, news websites, forums, tv programming, and so on.
>and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen.
They can go into the hosting business all they want. If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law. What they host should only be accessible when somebody consciously navigates to it in some hierarchical scheme or directly enters the address/handle.
They're already hosting everything in your feed, and if there were actually no ads then everyone on the site would be paying them to do it, at which point what do you expect to be in your feed?
That's a different model than paying a technical writer to do technical writing.
But now how are you distributing either of them?
Advertising is not distribution. Publishing is distribution, and advertising sometimes comes along for the ride.
> The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.
Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.
And then the question is, how do they get it? There are many ways to distribute. They could pay to print it out on paper and put it in the lobby in their corporate offices, but then customers would have to come to their corporate headquarters to get it, which most won't do, so obviously some methods of distribution have a higher likelihood of being seen. Then companies will prefer the ones that allow them to be seen more.
But they're paying someone for any of them, so "is paying for it" isn't a useful way to distinguish them.
And then we're back to, suppose you pay Facebook to host your documents on your company's Facebook page. Furthermore suppose that they, like most hosting companies, charge you more money if you get more traffic. Meanwhile their "hosting customers" on the "free tier" (i.e. ordinary Facebook users) have a very small quota which is really only enough for their posts to be seen by their own friends. So paying them for distribution -- like paying for any other form of distribution -- causes your documents to have better visibility. Now you can show up in the feed of more people before you run out of quota, just like paying more for hosting means more people could visit your website before you exceed your transfer allowance.
How do you tell if someone is paying for computing resources or eyeballs when the same company provides both? Notice that "don't let them do both" is a bit of a problem if you also don't let them sell advertising, because if they can't sell ads or charge for using the service then what are they doing for revenue?
> Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.
I agree with this statement, but it is irrelevant. The primary purpose of documentation is what I said: for understanding how to operate the product. The only purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Advertising has no secondary purpose. These are not the same thing.
The test is quite simple: Is the sole purpose of the payment to make a sale? If so, it is advertising.
We don't really need to discuss documents any longer. Documentation is not an advertisement.
They would obviously redeploy them to drafting or working to influence whatever means exists that still allows them to get new customers.
> The primary purpose of documentation is what I said: for understanding how to operate the product. The only purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Advertising has no secondary purpose. These are not the same thing.
This is like saying the primary purpose of advertising is to display media content.
The only purpose of the entire company is to make a sale. They ship the product from the factory to retail stores because that makes more sales than requiring the customer to come to the factory. They write documentation because more customers are willing to buy a product with documentation. And the documentation carefully portrays the product in a favorable light and directs customers to the company's own offerings -- how often do you see a commercial product's documentation recommending that the customer use a competitor's product under circumstances when that would actually be to the customer's advantage?
Meanwhile advertising also has secondary functions as well, like informing customers of product features they might not have been aware of, or informing them of risks or drawbacks of competing products, or providing active rather than passive notification for time-sensitive information like that a sale is happening, etc.
No, the only purpose - and therefore the primary purpose - of advertising is to make a sale.
You are arguing economics. And while that is a valid stance, it is not the only point of view. You might even be arguing that word of mouth is advertising. That doesn't fit the definition of paying some party with an expectation of a larger return. That's the only part of advertising that needs to be addressed (e.g., banned or reformed). The part that is most harmful. Word of mouth and other means of non-exploitative ways to gain customers are completely reasonable.
You're trying to weasel your way to finding some inescapable loophole for some reason that I cannot understand. There's no need to protect predatory behavior like advertising.
> how often do you see a commercial product's documentation recommending that the customer use a competitor's product under circumstances when that would actually be to the customer's advantage?
Since you are really digging into semantics, here, I'll bite. The documentation doesn't need to explicitly say this. It implies that the product's feature set may not fit the user's needs by their very descriptions. The user will go to a competitor on their own accord when those features do not meet their needs.
> Meanwhile advertising also has secondary functions as well, like informing customers of product features they might not have been aware of, or informing them of risks or drawbacks of competing products, or providing active rather than passive notification for time-sensitive information like that a sale is happening, etc.
The products themselves do that. The company's website, brochure, or product catalog have the information. They don't need to broadcast the widest net possible with the MicroMachines guy speedrunning their feature list to fit a 60-second ad spot. In fact, ads have such space and time constraints that the pertinent information literally cannot fit the allocation. Ads can only give very brief and very high level tidbits. It's a terrible model for information dispersal.
On the other hand, infomercials are 30 or 60 minute advertisements that tend to repeat the same thing ad infinitum. There's only so much you can say about knives, sunglasses, or exercise equipment. And yet, we have QVC. But here's the thing: I don't have to watch QVC. QVC isn't embedded into every website.
Although, plenty of low effort news sites really like to pin an autoplay video to the corner of my screen when I scroll down. These are nuisances. Somebody paying someone else to force me to watch or read something in the hopes that I will make a purchase. No. Just no. There's a good reason popups have been blocked on browsers by default for 20 years. Advertising is overly aggressive, and the margins are so piss poor that publishers are effectively getting ripped off by ad revenue. It's insulting to publishers and much worse to consumers.
At least on Twitch, the largest contributors to a streamer's income are donations, subscriptions, bits, and Twitch Turbo viewers. Possibly in that order. Ads are worth practically nothing.
Shroud is one of the most highly paid streamers on Twitch/YouTube. He recently described that his YouTube ad revenue nets between $5,000-$9,000 per month [1]. This might seem like a lot, but his gross income is estimated to be up to $10 million to $12 million per year [2]. YouTube ads account for approximately between 0.5% and 1% of his income.
Smaller publishers (e.g., content creators) don't even break double digit ad revenues per month [3].
Please, stop defending advertising. It is indefensible. It's bad for everyone.
[1]: https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/shroud-leaks-youtube-revenue...
[2]: https://www.msn.com/en-in/sports/other/michael-grzesiek-s-ne...
[3]: https://www.mogul.club/blogposts/how-much-do-twitch-streamer...
Even this isn't true. There are ads like this whose purpose is to encourage girls to learn to code:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o5fd7l2Uz0
In general there is the entire category of issue advertising where someone is trying to convince someone to do something rather than buy something. Non-profits also advertise to solicit donations, without which they would have a lot of trouble existing.
There are also ads for things like jobs where they're trying to hire someone rather than sell something and it's easier for everyone for the employer to take out a help wanted ad and the job-seeker to read the help wanted section than for everyone who wants a job to each try to identify who is hiring by visiting the listings page of every company in the world. In modern day people use job search sites rather than newspaper classified sections, but those are the same thing -- the revenue of those sites is from listings or placement, i.e. the listings are ads, and if they weren't charging for that they would have no revenue to cover their expenses. Even Craigslist charges for job postings and car listings etc. and indeed that's how even they keep the lights on.
Likewise, eBay is an advertising company by your definition. You pay them in order to make a sale, they display the ad for your product on their website in exchange for money. Are we banning eBay, or how are you going to distinguish it from Facebook Marketplace?
> Word of mouth and other means of non-exploitative ways to gain customers are completely reasonable.
That's pretty quickly going to lead to atroturfing which is even worse than advertising because at least ads tell you they're ads.
> The documentation doesn't need to explicitly say this. It implies that the product's feature set may not fit the user's needs by their very descriptions. The user will go to a competitor on their own accord when those features do not meet their needs.
Would you accept that line of reasoning if it was applied to "advertising"? The company knows better than a neophyte prospective customer the areas where their product is lacking or a competitor's is superior and is choosing to tell you the things that benefit them and not the things that don't.
> They don't need to broadcast the widest net possible with the MicroMachines guy speedrunning their feature list to fit a 60-second ad spot.
What if sometimes they do?
Suppose you overstocked some product and you need to get it out of your warehouse to make room for other products that will be delivered next week. So you lower the price, and you can publish the lower price on your website, but you need prospective customers to know about the lower price right now, not in six months when they next visit your website, because you need that stuff out of your warehouse in the next 7 days. And they need to know about the lower price right now because that stock will only be available for a week, so checking the website twice a year would cause them to miss the discounted price. So how do you make thousands of prospective customers aware of a time-sensitive discount without making them check prices every day?
> Advertising is overly aggressive
That seems like a different problem, i.e. you need a better ad blocker rather than a ban on advertising.
> the margins are so piss poor that publishers are effectively getting ripped off by ad revenue.
This again seems like a separate problem. Nobody is requiring publishers to use advertising instead of charging for subscriptions in order for companies to be able to buy ads on search engines or billboards or television.
> Even this isn't true. There are ads like this whose purpose is to encourage girls to learn to code:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o5fd7l2Uz0
Not an ad. They aren't paying the publisher (YouTube) to advertise the service.
This is the biggest issue I have with this thread. You are conflating "everything can advertise things" with the harmful behavior of paying for the privilege to place an advertisement in what is generally unrelated content. I'm aware that everything can advertise, and I'm unconcerned with that.
> There are also ads for things like jobs where they're trying to hire someone rather than sell something and it's easier for everyone for the employer to take out a help wanted ad and the job-seeker to read the help wanted section than for everyone who wants a job to each try to identify who is hiring by visiting the listings page of every company in the world.
Classified ads are in a different realm entirely. If you want to find a list of businesses that are hiring or a list of contractors willing to work, what better way than going to a classified ads directory? The act of intentionally looking for a directory is different from product placement and promotions. The latter are things that just materialize out of greed because advertisers want to steal attention away from the task the consumer intended.
In my book, advertisers could continue paying for all the classified ads they want! I don't have to look at the classifieds. They aren't being blasted to my screen or landing in my inbox until I intentionally go looking for them.
Alright, so the simple definition could use some work if exceptions like classified ads are wanted. (I'm not opposed to banning them, too, but what the heck. Let's complicate matters for no good reason.) Add some more constraints like, "Is the advertising embedded into content that is not solely a directory of ads?" until satisfied.
Eventually, it will contain so many exceptions that it will be useless. Which is perhaps your point. But I reject that point because I would just ban all ads without exception. No problem.
> Likewise, eBay is an advertising company by your definition. You pay them in order to make a sale, they display the ad for your product on their website in exchange for money. Are we banning eBay, or how are you going to distinguish it from Facebook Marketplace?
eBay is not an advertising company by the definition. eBay charges sellers to sell on the eBay platform. That is a service charge. Consumers must go to eBay to find things they wish to buy. The advertising part comes in from sellers who advertise by promoting their products in search results.
eBay is much closer to a brick-and-mortar retail store than an advertising company.
I know most people agree with the statement that "Google is an advertising company". But it's hard for me to fully accept that framing. Google has email, document storage, YouTube, phones, and hundreds of services and products that are not advertising. The fact that their primary revenue stream is siphoning from advertisers is concerning. But that doesn't make Google an advertising company. They mostly act as a publisher in that relationship. They also take a cut off the top of other publishers through AdSense and related advertising products.
> because at least ads tell you they're ads.
Yeah, that wasn't always the case. FTC's Dot Com Disclosures guide was originally written in 2000 and significantly updated in 2013. It's been more than 12 years since, and publishers are still trying to make ads appear "more natural" in content feeds, blurring the lines between disclosure and deception [4].
If you still have a landline, telemarketers are relentless and many of them to do say who they are advertising for, even if they are required. (My first job was in telemarketing as a teenager. I lasted one whole week before quitting. This might have something to do with my absolute opposition to advertising. Who knows.)
> Would you accept that line of reasoning if it was applied to "advertising"? The company knows better than a neophyte prospective customer the areas where their product is lacking or a competitor's is superior and is choosing to tell you the things that benefit them and not the things that don't.
I am unsure what you are asking. Companies always want to make themselves look better than competitors. Which is why their technical documentation reads the way it does. (E.g. not saying "don't use Acme products!" or "our product is superior to Acme's!") So, I agree with you, but I don't see how this line of reasoning applies to advertising.
Ads are incentivized to say things like "better than the leading brand" because the short form content doesn't give a lot of room to provide actual sustenance. Is that what you are getting at?
> What if sometimes they do?
First of all, "not my problem". But realistically, if I overstocked a product that isn't selling, that's a good teachable moment. A wise conclusion would be to not overstock risky investments in the future.
As for how to correct it without advertising your horde to every possible consumer, there are a few options. 1) Make it all someone else's problem. Sell it in bulk at a discount to a liquidator, bin store, or auction house. 2) Put the products into more marketplaces. eBay, Amazon, Newegg, even Wal-Mart has a marketplace [3] you can sell on. 3) File it as a loss and trash it. Landfills are filled with unsold goods. That's a cost of chasing the consumerism dream on the back of advertising.
Secondly, if the company is selling this stock on their own website, as you posed in this scenario, they can do all of the "SALE!" advertising on their own website that they want. This is like seeing "SALE!" signs when you go to Wal-Mart. You expect to see those inside Wal-Mart. You don't expect to see them in restaurants, on the sides of buildings and buses, or while reading the news. Let me make a small correction: I don't expect to see "SALE!" signs in places that are unrelated to buying whatever product is on sale. That's the problem to solve. Always has been.
> That seems like a different problem, i.e. you need a better ad blocker rather than a ban on advertising.
Ad blockers are sufficient for removing ads. I don't have a gap in my capability to block ads, including aggressive ads. I just hate ads. There is a gap with devices outside of my control, however. Some of those gaps can be covered by blocking at the network layer. Some cannot.
But are we really having this conversation? I'm the problem, not advertising? That gives me a lot more credibility/accountability than I would expect! I am in fact not more powerful than global syndication. So, I can't be the problem.
The fact that ads are overly aggressive is not my fault. Nor is it my problem that I have already blocked them all. My problem is that I just don't want ads polluting otherwise good spaces for leisure or intellectual pursuit. That's it. Ad pollution = bad.
> This again seems like a separate problem. Nobody is requiring publishers to use advertising instead of charging for subscriptions in order for companies to be able to buy ads on search engines or billboards or television.
Not a different problem. Same problem. Twitch [1] and YouTube [2] do not give content creators a means of opting out of running ads.
Search engines are publishers, and advertisers pay them to promote their products in search results. Billboards are built on private land, and advertisers pay the landowners to advertise on their billboards. These are the same business model. Publishers take a small cut and advertisers hope to take a big cut. But in some cases ([1] and [2]), Twitch and YouTube are the publishers, the content creators are not the publishers in these "forced-ads" relationships. (There are cases where the content creators are the publishers. E.g., becoming a parter to take a small cut of an already small payment for ad revenue; the Shroud case we explored earlier in the thread. And sponsored segments.) Twitch and YouTube take all of the ad revenue. That's the Google/Facebook model, lovingly referred to as enshittification.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/1j0k99n/comment/mff...
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/18/youtube...
[3]: https://marketplace.walmart.com/
[4]: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-tests-new-ad-display...
If they just banned infinite scrolling someone would come up with something equivalent that works slightly differently. Now they need a whole new law. It’s just constant whack-a-mole.
So instead they seem to ban goals. Your thing accomplishes that goal? It’s banned.
It’s a pretty different way than how we seem to do things in the US. But I can see upsides.
If what you put up on that billboard is an ad, then it's advertising and would be covered. If not, it wouldn't. So you could rent a spot on the website, but you couldn't put promotions on it.
This would be distinct from ordinary web hosting because you're not just renting a space on a site, you're also renting exposure (a spot on some other website).
Sure, you could probably find edge cases - "what if I put a table of contents on my page with every page URL on every site on my web host on it" - but the distinction would be clear most of the time.
At the core of the first amendment is the idea that people should not be punished for criticizing their government. I think that idea is worth preserving. But the idea that people are free to say anything they choose, in any context, regardless of its factual status, and also that their permission to do so is limited only by the resources they can muster to promulgate their speech, is an unwarranted extension of that concept.
The cold hard reality is that no matter how much you trust the people in the government today, eventually they will be replaced by people you consider to be the scum of the earth. And when that day comes, you will curse the day you allowed the government to punish speech, because you'll see speech you consider perfectly justified become illegal.
There is no way of listing rights on paper that can protect you if truly evil people get into power. But there are ways of listing rights on paper that can allow good people who believe in those rights to defend them in ways that involve preventing evil people from getting into power. Free speech is not a magic bullet in either direction.