Hacker News Reader

Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Taxing or banning advertising alone would fix literally everything that is wrong with the web.

It would definitely help and I'd support it. I would much rather pay a fixed cost to use the internet and remove all the poisonous crap we're stuck dealing with to "keep the internet free".

Do you know what happen when advertising is banned? It would go underground -- product placement, contest, merchandises, and so on. Advertising existed as soon as commerce became a thing, probably thousand years ago. It can't be banned. I wouldn't vote for that.

Regulation, on the other hand, is fine. How? I don't know.

> It can't be banned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

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

> It can't be banned

Sure it can. I don't see how being old makes it immune.

It'd be tough to phrase it right. Imagine that The Ones Who Ban Things decide to write something interpretable as essentially "nobody is allowed to inform others about things". The process of distilling any ad banning law into applicable testing of that law would be pretty scary to me

Other legistlation plays a similar game:

- Slandering laws set a limit for what you can say about others

- Copyright laws set a limit on what you can share with others under which circumstances

Both those things seem similarly complicated to implement and yet we have them.

You're saying that as if we don't already have all these.

Taxing may be a good way to restore balance. Banning means goodbye online news, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Translate, ad-supported games, etc. -- basically everything we've become accustomed to having for free will want a monthly subscription.

> Banning means goodbye online news, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Translate, ad-supported games, etc.

Good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com