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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

In a lot of countries in the EU, advertising for tobaco products, prescription medication, lawyer/docts are prohibited. That ban has been working quite well for decades.

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This is true, but it's worth adding that there are no blog posts about those things either, or articles, discussions, etc except in very limited niche places dedicated to talking about them.

If there was a ban on 'internet advertising of anything' then it would basically kill all discussion of any products on the internet.

It wouldn't, we in Germany have clear laws when you have to mark something in media as "advertisment" - it is whenever you received a "reward" in order to talk about something, you have to mark it. A reward is already when you receive a product for free, or get reimbursed for travel cost etc. It is clearly definable. Yes, we will never reach 100% success rate, but 95% is already a big step.

Paid blogs/articles are worse than nothing. They are anti-information. If you did successfully eliminate those things, the currently niche places with honest discussion would be easier to find.

How have you managed to take an example of where this worked and then proceed to entirely disapply it in a wider context?

Like what the internet was before advertising? ;)

Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1992. Doubleclick started in 1995. So yes, like those glorious 3 years when hardly anyone was online and most access was via a 28kbps modem.

I'd take adverts over that. :)

In the US, sport teams usually don’t have sponsors on their jerseys. In the EU they do have every inch covered.

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