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I really liked the idea of banning advertising from this blog post (though the post itself is somewhat poorly written and light on the details). HN has a lively discussion of it. I've seen some mentions of this idea here and there but never a really good analysis on it. And I want to change that!
The first step is of course to tighten up the definitions. The most important is to define advertising. I would define it as:
(Maybe the resident lawyers here could have a crack at cleaning this up?)
The underlying theory of harm is that party C is getting inaccurate information designed (often very well designed) to manipulate them into a decision not in their interests. Note that crowding out good information is also very much part of the harm. If C is getting good information from sources not paid for it, it is reasonable that these unpaid sources won't put as much effort into disseminating information as sources paid to spread information (which presumably won't be as truthful due to the conflicting interests from party A).
To clean up potential fuzzy boundaries (I'm sure I've missed a bunch):
So, what is illegal?
Why do I want this?
Possible objections?
Any thoughts?
I like some things about this idea of making advertising illegal. It's good to notice that there's something wrong here. That the amount of effort we put into saturating the mind of the median consumer with the names of brands just seems excessive. Amazon, Walmart, State Farm, Verizon, L’Oréal, DraftKings, etc - if it's been more than 10 minutes since you've seen one of those words, that's an inefficiency and the invisible hand's working to correct it. Why should so many competent people spend their 9/5 in marketing ensuring normal people purchase more makeup or clothing or food or parlays that doesn't particularly improve their lives? I get the concept of advertising as presenting consumers with information they might not have so they can make better purchase, but we've clearly gone beyond that.
On the other hand, the problem here isn't really advertising. It's not like DraftKings or running up credit card debt by shopping would disappear if we banned ads. It'd happen less, but only somewhat less. The problems people identify with advertising, I would argue, are really problems with the things being advertised, and in general with modern culture or whatever. Advertising by itself serves a useful purpose, connecting people selling things to people buying them. If something's broken in there, advertising will be broken too, but banning advertising doesn't really get to the heart of the problem.
Also, I mostly agree with FiveHour's post.
I think I uncomplicatedly support a law of the form "you must allow ad-blockers, not circumvent them, and provide the option to disable ads in native apps where ad-blockers don't work" though, because though uBlock gets everything in a browser they still do waste my time sometimes.
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I'm not sure I accept your premise that advertising is a net negative. There are certainly many things I have gladly purchased that I found out about through advertising. My intuitive sense is that ads have had a net positive or at least net neutral impact on my life, not a negative one.
But I will accept the premise that we want to ban ads for the sake of the discussion.
As one of the "resident lawyers" I don't think there's a way to meaningfully define advertising in a way that only captures what you want to capture.
First off, your definition doesn't stop party A from directly advertising to party C. This is the first major loophole, and it's incredibly easy to get around. Big companies just increase the size of their marketing departments and do all ads in house. Little companies can't afford to do this and just get crushed. Bad outcome.
Second, there's the issue of "pays." In the example you give, you seem to interpret this narrowly to mean "give money" but there are many ways to compensate or incentivize people to do things without directly paying them. So this is another relatively easy loophole to exploit.
Third, there's "unsolicited information" which is extremely nebulous and includes many things we don't generally think of as advertising:
Suppose I turn on the TV hoping to watch the local news. The news broadcast is interrupted by a weather report. I didn't want to see the weather report because I get the weather from an app on my phone. Isn't the weather report an example of party A (the station) paying party B (the weatherman) to give unsolicited information (the forecast) to party C (me)?
Suppose I pull up behind a car with bumper stickers on it (e.g. "Baby on Board" or the Christian fish). Isn't this an example of party A (the driver) paying party B (the maker of the bumper sticker) to give unsolicited information (the info on the bumper sticker) to party C (me)?
Suppose I buy clothing with the brand's logo prominently displayed on it. Isn't this an example of party A (me) paying party B (the clothing company) to give unsolicited information (the clothing brand I am wearing) to party C (others around me)?
Suppose I hire an artist to make me a large sign supporting my favorite politician and I place it in my front yard. Isn't this an example of party A (me) paying party B (the artist) to give unsolicited information (my political views) to party C (others around me)?
I already answered most of your objections in my original post. Specifically, I wrote:
So, direct advertisements (e.g. "marketing" copy posted on the company's own website for its own products) isn't covered by my definition at all and would continue to be legal (intentionally so).
And your third objection:
Please think about these examples in light of the theory of harm that I proposed:
None of them (except the branded clothing example possibly) run afoul of it.
Branded clothing is a genuine gray area. If there was similar but non-branded clothing available from the same company that sold for more, I'd definitely consider the branded clothing paid for by the discount. But there often won't be and at least for the initial implementation, I think such cases would slip by. But branded products are easily one of the least egregious forms of marketing around.
Nonstandard forms of payment: is already something the legal profession (and industry at large) has a lot of experience dealing with for e.g. insider trading, bribes, trusted actors getting free expensive meals from sales people, etc... Banks for example have very extensive policies around limits to entertaining clients to "avoid the appearance of impropriety."
And finally:
I'm trying to be charitable here but this is just so far from my experiences that I have a hard time believing it. How often in a typical month do you buy something off of an advertisement? Something that you weren't already thinking of getting (or at least a generally similar product)?
This is a loophole you can drive a truck through. "Party B isn't giving unsolicited information to Party C. Party B is giving it to the broadcast station, who is then broadcasting it to Party C."
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All you've done here is childishly blow the American tech industry's brains out because you think commercials are a drag. China will happily pick up the slack when no one wants to pay thirty bucks a month for Instagram or whatever, leaving you with nothing.
I'm curious if, in this insane scenario, it would become possible for global brands to advertise on streams based in foreign countries, for the purpose of targeting American consumers of those same goods located in America. The NFL becomes PPV in the USA, but it streams free live on TikTok, and Coca Cola and Apple (through their Chinese subsidiaries, of course!) run advertisements during the game.
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Many? I can only think of one thing in my entire adult life, which was a type of pants for being a bum on the couch that I hadn't tried before. And if I had never learned about them I would be like .001% less comfortable the 10 days a year I wear them instead of normal sweat pants.
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It would just be impossible especially with more relationships online.
Every conversation on the motte would need to be monitored and bank accounts checked to make sure now one is being paid for promoting a product. It’s not at all weird for online communities to end up having discussions on best car to buy or lawnmower. There would be no way to differentiate between guy being paid and guy just talking about what he likes.
How do porn ads work? Usually I just X out and with thousands of times masturbating I can’t think of how any ad resulted in money changing hands.
Honestly don’t even know how meta ads works. The only thing I’ve ever bought from a meta ad was one of those ads you get when you already bought the thing. Sometimes I buy more. I have no idea if that’s freeloading some ad revenue on what I was going to buy or influenced me.
But if we did manage to get rid of 95% of ads my gut says I would like the world better and things would be cheaper. I currently have zero stock positions in businesses making money off selling ads so now would be a great time for Trump to announce no more ads.
And of course obviously stupid debate for first amendment reasons. I think a lot of current ad limitations are unconstitutional.
The cops don't go around drug testing your food every single time you go to a restaurant. But what if there was fentanyl in your cocktail?!
Enforcement is always a sliding scale and thankfully has good economies of scale. If someone is doing something blatantly illegal, only a few people need to spot one instance of it for the whole thing to come to light (and ex post punishments work quite well). And yes, minor violations will slip by. As long as the major violations get caught, we've still made a lot of progress.
One thing that helps us here is that people at large don't like ads. We're not trying to prevent a transaction that all parties consider beneficial and therefore all parties have an incentive to hide. At least one party here (the final customer marketed to) is getting harmed (and believes that they're getting harmed). And I suspect a lot of corporations don't like paying through the nose for marketing either but just can't do anything about it. I suspect they'd love a legally enforced marketing truce so they could get back to competing on the merits of their products. After all, why does the average nerd get into making something? Because they love the prospect of marketing it? Or actually making it?
You don't. But I'm sure some consumer of porn would. Or just websites who don't want their competition to get an illicit leg up in the market? We only need one (or a few) of them to bring in the authorities.
Thanks. Thought gotta admit I got a small laugh out of the idea of Trump (or really anybody in federal government) pulling off something this contentious and complicated.
The supreme court has been willing to be fairly nuanced for example in the case of porn and political donations. Campaign finance laws are still a thing even though the supreme court has ruled that political donations are covered by the first amendment.
They also don't like it when the entire internet implodes and the parts that are left suddenly all cost money. It's one thing to fantasize about what you'd do if you were absolute dictator, but if you're involving public opinion in this game then it ends with you being tarred and feathered.
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I don't think there's any good way to make this work, but I do sympathize with the idea. Especially on the internet, so many ads just seem malicious. They're not there because anyone would actually see them and think "ooh, good product, I want to buy that!" They're there to trick you into accidentally clicking on them by completely covering the scream, or to screach at you with obnoxious sounds until you get so fed up that you buy a premium subscription to make them go away. If there was a way to buy a "premium internet pass" that would get rid of all internet ads I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately I have to do that individiually for every single website, which is its own sort of pain. My personal pet peave is trying to read a news article from some small local news site, which is technically open and not paywalled, it's just crammed full of so many ads that it's basically impossible to read for anyone not subscribed to "the Daily Times of Gary, Indiana" or whatever. I wouldn't mind subscribing to one or two newspapers, maybe even more if I was a professional journalist or something, but it seems unreasonable to expect me to subscribe to every single newspaper on Earth just so I can read one random article.
There... is a place that has managed to remove advertising completely: North Korea. It's kind of bleak and dystopian but... oddly calming? (Other than the state propaganda posters of course) Well, I've never been there so I can't say what it's like, but it's interesting that such a place can even exists, and gives us a glimpse of a different sort of life with a very different aesthetic.
The uBlock Origin browser extension gets you about 95% of the way there.
Yeah... there's that. (world-weary sigh)
I've used ad-blockers for as long as they've been commonly available- maybe 15 years now? I moved around from one to another, in a never-ending "Red Queen's Race" between advertisers and ad-blockers. uBlock Origin really seemed like "the one" and I happily enjoyed it for about 5 years. But then they abruptly removed it from Chrome. And at this point I'm so tied into Chrome (gmail, Android, other extensions) that it would be a huge pain to switch. Sure, I could switch, but I feel like it's only a matter of time before they clamp down again on uBlock Origin in some other way. Because, let's face it, it's basically piracy- it's a way to hack websites to get their content without paying for it by seeing ads. It feels like when people told me "dont' worry that Napster is getting banned, you can just switch to Kazaa...Limewire... Bittorrent... PirateBay... etc...". When I just give in and pay their premium fee, our interests are aligned and the ads go away perfectly.
(also I disagree that it's 95%. My experience was more like 50%, varying wildly depending on the website.)
I just switched to uBlock Origin Lite and it seems to work just as well.
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What? I've literally never seen an ad slip through a blocker.
Then use Brave. It's Chrome, but based (has it's own integrated blocker, supports uBlock, and has a host of other QOL features like vertical tabs).
What's up with all this technological learned helplessness? People used to find and flock to alternatives at light speed.
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Your current best option is a pi-hole, which cuts off ads at the DNS level. It’s not something advertisers can easily distinguish from a genuine failed connection.
interesting, thanks!
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This is a terrible, infantile idea.
This is so blatantly untrue that it's hard to take the rest of the essay seriously. Advertising appears with the newspaper. The first paid newspaper advertisement in American history was in 1704 in Boston, it is literally older than the United States of America. Zero research was done going into this, just a whiny infant complaining about advertising that could be easily avoided.
There's not going to BE any general experience of the web you stupid slut.
The entire general experience of the web is built around advertising. An entirely paid model of web usage is not something we've ever really seen. Note that I don't include a model that is built primarily around free-riding on government/university research dollars, like the early internet. Nor a model that is built around the millennial lifestyle subsidy like current Substack or ChatGPT, where the free infrastructure is funded by VC money with the expectation of later exploitation. All that's left after you remove those are hobbies or charity, like TheMotte or Wikipedia, which probably can't exist without the infrastructure built by the advertising-funded products anyway.
Moreover, on the web or not, you are asking for every ad you are ever shown, other than billboards I guess. Libraries exist! Physical media can be borrowed from them, and you would have more media than you would ever be able to consume in fifteen lifetimes, and never see a single ad beyond a flier for the knitting circle. Yet nobody who complains about advertising does that. If ads on youtube offended people, they could pay for youtube premium, but they mostly don't. If ads on twitter offended people, they could pay for whatever it is Elon is calling it now. They mostly don't. Why not? The ad-supported Kindle is $20 cheaper than the ad free one, the ad-supported model outsells the ad-free version. And, of course, physical media exists, you could purchase movies on DVD and books at bookstores and you would have more than enough content for the rest of your life, but people don't do that. Because people are more than willing to accept the cost of advertising to get free-to-them, or even just reduced price, content. There is no circumstance in which you are forced to watch ads, in every case you are choosing to consume content that would not be available without advertising to support it, or you are choosing to consume it through a medium that is supported by ads. The revealed preference is that people don't care about ads.
The only real exception that occurs to me is sports, which are impossible to watch without seeing ads. American sports like the NFL and MLB are shown with ads in the broadcast, while racecars and MMA fighters and soccer teams give no option to skip ads as they are on the competitors themselves! But, of course, without those ads we wouldn't have those competitions at those levels. Without advertising, I wouldn't be able to get the game on the radio or OTA TV, I'd have to go PPV, which I would not do. Without sponsor dollars, MMA fighters wouldn't be able to train to the level that they have pushed the sport. The ecosystem would be impossible. The same, of course, applies to things like local radio news: no traffic on the twos without Chevy dealers BLOWING OUT THEIR INVENTORY. Well, I guess we'd still have NPR, that bastion of politically neutral fact-finding...
Which is the real point, advertising in media is a good thing because it supports neutral media motivated purely by capitalism. When we mourn the decline of the politically-neutral American local newspaper, we are too stupid to realize what we are mourning is mostly the decline of newspaper advertising. Time was, you needed the newspaper to find out basic facts about the world. Movie times, church schedules, the weather. Every responsible American needed access to a newspaper, which drove mass subscriptions, which made advertising in the newspaper profitable, which funded investigative journalism and reporting. And because the goal was to sell ads, newspapers wanted the broadest reach possible, Republicans buy sneakers too. Once the advertising model breaks down, you get the modern newspaper industry. Local papers lack any but the most rudimentary reporting, while national papers like the New York Times cater to subscriber biases and lose even the pretense of neutrality. Substack, again, suffers from this: while an occasional gem might appear in the muck, almost every substack author becomes captured by his audience, forced to cater to their whims. So many interesting bloggers or writers become increasingly less interesting as they cater to their audiences' whims. In a world without advertising, we are at the mercy of subscribers and their biases.
I think the stronger argument against ads is more that the median ad that makes someone purchase something is causing them to make a purchase that they probably shouldn't in a more ideal world, and people both do that and accept their time being wasted with extremely repetitive advertising because they're bad at making tradeoffs. So that people 'accept the cost' isn't a strong counterargument. And idk if the internet or sports would be doomed or particularly harmed without this much advertising, the economy is an equilibrium, people really like sports and the internet and would find other ways to pay for it. I'm not sure your last paragraph is an argument for advertising specifically more than it is an argument for a class of intellectuals with independent funding and has strong influence over the information diet of the average American. But as I said in my other comment I don't think the problem here is really the ads, it's the things being advertised.
Once you start with this logic, you end up somewhere between the khmer rouge and the Uncle Ted. Which, fine, make a much bigger argument for that if you want to, but it's way outside the bounds of OP or the essay he's citing back to. I don't think a mass consumer production economy is possible without branding and advertising. But then when you say:
There's a big difference between "Advertising should be more strictly regulated and limited" and "Advertising should be illegal." I don't even think you can really get from one to the other in terms of consequences.
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Dude... Chill... This is just a random internet forum. No need to get worked up about it.
First off, chill out. There's no need for personal attacks. And quantity very much matters here. Some random ad in a medium that nobody pays attention to is very different from our current environment where we are positively bathed in this stuff every moment of every day.
I agree that people not paying for ad-free products is a good argument. My first counter-argument is that e.g. paying for youtube premium would only get rid of a small fraction of ads that I experience every day. The marginal gain isn't worthwhile. People do regularly pay for ad blockers (or at least put in effort into getting them). And friction is a thing. There are lots of services that I could theoretically benefit from but don't pay for because it isn't worth the hassle of managing. Youtube is a tiny part of my day. The hassle of managing a youtube premium subscription isn't worthwhile (and they've done nothing to reduce the hassle because they don't have an incentive to).
My second is something I brought up in my original post:
I genuinely think this soft marketing war drastically inflates the "value" of ads. After all, does Amazon (or their marketing clients) really expect people to buy twenty dollars worth of stuff off the ads on a Kindle? I'm an order of magnitude away from that for my entire life for all ads I've ever seen anywhere! No, I suspect it is companies trying not to get drowned out.
There's also a large economy of scale problem here. Consumer Reports exists. They are small because they're expensive and they're expensive because they're small. Yes, removing ads would be a sea change in how our information systems have to operate and people are going to have to get used to paying explicitly for a lot more stuff. It's going to require new business models and interfaces. Substack is a great example. I woul;d have never paid for individual bloggers before them. It was just too much of a hassle even if I enjoyed the content. But Substack (and Patreon as well) have drastically reduced friction and as a result, I just checked and I'm paying for ~ten blogs (with subscriptions to a few more). And if after all that, customers still don't want to pay... I contend that's a good thing. It's the market aligning with people's actual expressed preferences.
Regarding neutral media: capitalism is customers paying for neutral media. And I don't know about you but most of my neutral media comes from Substack (which you also don't like for some reason...) where I do in fact pay directly to hear from sources that I care about. And Substack the company is technically not profitable yet but the popular writers on there are extremely profitable which makes me think that Substack the company could be easily profitable if they wanted to be. After all, how much does it really cost to host a bunch of simple mostly-text-and-images websites in 2026?
Dude...Chill...This just a random internet forum. No need to get worked up about it. We argue, we hang out. Stick around, somebody will accuse you of much worse.
But I don't think we disagree that much really. When you say:
Then I can't philosophically argue with it. If you think the internet as it exists today is bad and should be burned to the ground and salted, great, I can jive with that. The vast majority of content would not exist or be accessible without ad supported models, if that is your goal than this is a good policy to reach it. If you are willing to bite the bullet and say Twitter Delenda Est, and youtube and facebook and instagram and every other social media service with it, then we can get to a logical position. But that is what you are arguing for here, and it's much bigger than advertising, there's not going to be social media or open content platforms that are subscription based. I'm actually curious to see someone try to make one, but I'm not sure I would subscribe if they did anyway. Even this place I wouldn't want to subscribe, a one time payment maybe, but the hassle isn't worth it.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Youtube exists you can choose: a) not to consume youtube, b) to pay for youtube, c) pay for premium. The same choices exist for every content outlet. If ads offended you and you wanted to minimize consumption of ads, it would make sense to avoid advertising based content and stick to a few outlets that you can make ad free. Premium would give you an ad-free outlet, and if ads were as distasteful to the average consumer as believed, then one would consume only ad-free outlets. There's clearly a free market for ad-based and ad-free content operating right now, and most people consistently choose ad-based content over ad-free content.
This gets into a much bigger discussion, but I strongly suspect this isn't true, even if you think it is. You've almost definitely had >$20 of marginal spend for all the ads you've ever seen in your life, across every category of good. TLP's favorite scene from The Devil Wears Prada fits in here. Another example: when I was a kid the Greyhound Rescue had a booth at the fair every year. Fifteen years later, at 26, my wife wanted a dog, and I thought a greyhound would be a good pick, based on that awareness that formed long ago. I just wasn't in the market until then, but if they hadn't done that "advertising" I would never have gotten one.
Consider also with the Kindle example: I owned and used my first kindle for over a decade. Ten years of advertising is worth something.
But I'm not sure what the difference is to you between "Buying $20 worth of stuff" vs "not getting drowned out" anyway.
Clearly it costs more than Substack is making! I exclude Substack not because I dislike it, but because it is not profitable. Virtually every place we complain about ads today, didn't have ads at one point, and then they were introduced later to try to make the company profitable. Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, Twitter. All used to be ad free. The Millenial Lifestyle Subsidy is the generational trauma of our time. Elon briefly mooted making Twitter subscription only and eliminating advertisements, but quickly abandoned that plan because it had no hope of success.
My other problem with substack as a neutral source of information is that subscriber based content inevitably tends towards siloed bubbles and extremes as writers cater to their subscribers. You're never going to subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson, and she is never going to subscribe to Kulak. Advertising on its own does not fix this, but it offers at least one path to success that doesn't rely on catering to the whims of your hardcore supporters. I'm glad Substack exists, there's value in allowing marginal and extreme voices to exist, but I don't find it a good source for neutral fact based reporting. Substack isn't going to tell me what went on at my local township meetings, or even in Harrisburg or Philadelphia. It's good for news in the sense of current events-commentary-opinion, it's not yet good for the kind of fundamentally uninteresting hard news that one historically got from a newspaper. And newspapers themselves have gotten worse at that job because of their reliance on subscriptions, leading to spiraling left-wing bias, leading to a shrinking and more left wing subscriber base, leading to spiraling left wing bias.
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You're right, banning advertising would destroy the web as we know it. Was there also a downside?
... you might want to reread that sentence and see if you can spot any logical inconsistencies.
The media motivated by capitalism unsurprisingly has a very strong pro-captial bias. Which has been intensifying in the past few years with billionaires buying up the remaining reputable media outlets like The Washington Post and CBS (those being more recent examples, this is not a new trend).
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What about Kiwi Farms? As far as I'm aware it is funded entirely by donations and Null maintains his own infrastructure.
Hobby.
That's a bit dismissive. Yes, Kiwi Farms technically is a rather low-tier website, but it's my understanding that its admin has had to put in far more effort than usual for a "hobby" website—e. g., placing his own hardware in data centers, and implementing his own software to battle people who DDOS and spam illegal content on his website to try to get it taken offline.
If it's not a business that makes money, it's a hobby, according to the IRS. I guess maybe you could classify it conceptually (though not legally) as a charity?
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That's the newspaper industry breaking down, not the advertising model specifically. And a lot of woke depends on civil rights laws, government agencies, and similar non-market forces.
I'm pretty sure Disney still does a lot of advertising. It hasn't kept them nonpolitical.
And it does cost $395/year, for the cheapest tier, 'X Premium+', that actually removes all instead of some twitter ads, which is a nontrivial fraction (something like 1/100th) of the median personal income in the US.
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When I block an annoying ad on twitter for Israeli hostage funding or something, it tells me that I can remove all ads by subscribing to premium. People don't get that?
...And then I don't pay them the next month.
What socialist powderpuff world do we live in where the profit a corporation makes has to be proportional to their costs rather than proportional to the value the customer puts on the service?
What catch-22? This is good price discrimination, every customer gets what they want at a price they can afford.
"That's not the industry breaking down, just its entire revenue model. Surely the industry won't be impacted by the loss of the majority of its revenue!
In the 1950s the New York Times made 70-80% of its revenue from advertising, today it is just 20%. You think that has nothing to do with the decline of newspaper journalism?
It doesn't apply in every single case.
The profit doesn't "have to" be proportional to the company's costs, but in a working market where companies compete against each other, a company's profit will be proportional to its costs because if it tries to make too much profit, it will be undercut by a competing company that makes less profit but wins over all the customers. If this doesn't happen, that's a market failure. And of course a market failure is exactly what this is.
Price discrimination in general is a bad deal for the consumer, because in the limit you end up with everyone paying so much that they only benefit by a tiny fractional amount from the product compared to not buying it.
This is like saying that every death is caused by heart failure. In a sense it's true, but it's described in a way which obfuscates what's going on. Yes, if the Times can't sell papers, it can't sell ads in papers. If the Times was hit by a meteor it would be able to sell even fewer papers, and thus gain even less from advertising, but describing that as "that's its revenue model breaking down" would be misleading, if technically true.
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So I am someone who hates ads, and I use adblock on my main browser. However, I like to watch YouTube on my TV, which means I get ads.
I despise these ads, and wish I could make them go away; however, I have a fundamental dislike of paying for people to unshittify their services. There are a few reasons why:
(I feel like I should include a #3 there, but oh well).
In addition, I find that advertising is very much a thing where more of it makes it shittier for everyone. Like, there are a lot of services where I'm price sensitive, but the quality of the thing is not going to matter much. Take Uber vs Lyft vs a taxi - if all 3 of them are going to cost me approximately the same, take the same amount of time to show up, then I don't really care which of the 3 I get. However, if Uber is aggressively advertising, they're going to show up first when I google "taxi (my city)", which means that Lyft and the taxi services are going to have to pay to advertise, which means all 3 of them have to raise their rates to pay for advertising.
I don't think it's realistic to ban them; however, I'd be in favour of having a national vote for the most annoying ad of the year, and the person who made it being forbidden from ever going on the internet again (/s, probably).
Edit: I think one of the reasons that I find advertising so annoying is that it is inflicted upon me in a way that a lot of other stuff just isn't. Paying to not experience something is fundamentally irritating - it feels a lot like someone decided to make my day worse, and is requiring money to stop doing so. Like, if Apple or whatever made a deal with spam callers so that the "Hang Up" button on my phone is disabled unless I listen to their whole spiel, or pay them $20, I think most people would rightly decry this as insane.
You're still getting ads for Internet Explorer 10?
Nah, this was back when it came out - I hated that ad so much that it sticks out in my mind.
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How would you like for Youtube to pay for the infrastructure around getting those videos to you? Who do you think should be paying to host, manage, and operate the service?
If it's such a burden for Youtube, maybe they should stop focusing on maximizing watch time and keeping people on the site resulting in screen addiction, one of the many ills of modern society.
I think Youtube being so centralized and massive is itself a big problem. Rather than people hosting their own websites where they distribute their own videos and eventually finding ways to distribute videos cheaply, people just decided to outsource video hosting to Youtube, and now they've built up a huge network effect where you can't simply take all your videos and move to a different site, and even if you could you can't just take all your viewers with you. Even the content creators on this service are called "Youtubers" rather than creators. Separately, centralization poses huge questions for archival and preservation of a huge aspect of our culture. What happens if the entire thing goes down? Youtube is even actively hostile to downloading videos and archival efforts, they likely threatened the youtube-dl developers into going away, and the replacement fork yt-dlp is constantly having to make changes and is slowly weakening in accessibility and usability through no fault of their own.
I wasn't expecting to write an anti-Youtube screed, but this is how I feel. I guess my answer is that I don't care if Youtube has to bleed money to provide a service without ads, because the consequences of that are more desirable than the status quo.
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I mean, given that I go out of my way to not buy anything I see advertised to me, and I use adblock as much as possible outside of that, I'd say it's not me either way.
More seriously, I don't think it should be regulated out of existence; I was just opining that a lot of advertising is annoying as shit and if I could make it all go away with a sweep of a magic wand, I would.
Yes yes, it's very fun being a free rider. Convenient that there are still enough rubes that we can get away with it for a while.
But you object to advertising and you object to paying for youtube, but you like watching youtube. How do you think youtube should be funded?
I would rather that youtube die, but as long as it is alive, its network effects make competition hard, so I have no choice but to watch it if I want to watch amateur videos. I wouldn't call this "like watching Youtube". I like watching some things that are on Youtube, but the fact that they are on Youtube makes them worse and if Youtube didn't exist they would be better.
This is like the argument that Microsoft has brought computers to people by creating Windows. No, they don't get credit for doing X if they do X worse than other people would but I have to go through them because they have a stranglehold on the market.
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My answer is, I don't have to care. I'll ride for free until the wheels fall off, and then I'll pirate everything until copyright enforcement assassins break in through the ceiling and kill me. I will live in a cave and eat bugs and make the rest of humanity join me before I ever watch god damn commercials again.
Y'all gotta stop trying to replace a good system with a fair one.
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I am not convinced that people using adblock or not buying advertising products are free riders. I suspect its anyone who's revenue is derived from ads.
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I mean, ideally I'd be able to pay the individual channels that I like watching money, based on my usage, and have YouTube take some percentage of that.
Given that my only option though is to pay $13.99 directly to YouTube, I think I'll pass.
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This is an individualistic argument, but isn't the more compelling case for removing ads one from social good? Ads are a net negative to the consumer AND to the companies who have to pay for them. As someone who works in a marketing-adjacent field, it's worth noting that we still don't have good ways to tell if traditional advertising is actually effective at driving sales, and there's compelling evidence that its effect for many brands is near zero. Yet companies are compelled to have an ad spend in order to keep up with the competition. Side note: modern guerilla marketing (which is essentially word-of-mouth) is a different story, but I don't think that's actually what OP is complaining about, any more than OP would say reviews should be banned. On the flip side, the most heavily advertised products are generally the worst, or at least a subpar option, which is why the need so much advertising to begin with. As a result, naive consumers are bamboozled into buying worse products for higher prices (they have to cover the overhead of the ads after all).
In my view this resolves into a tragedy of the commons situation. Everyone would benefit if ads (or at least certain modalities) were banned, but each individual player is incentivized from taking that step. Hence we need the Leviathan to step in.
I would bet like all of my net worth against this. Being told a product exists makes you realize you might buy it. Being told something exists 500 times makes the average person more likely to realize you might buy it. Big companies have tried reducing ad spend and measuring if it reduces profits, and it has, and then they restarted ad spend.
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Yep. Agreed. Thanks.
As long as the "guerilla" marketers aren't paid for spreading the information, that's perfectly fine. And I explicitly stated that unpaid reviews would be fine:
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There's no point arguing about the social good of advertising in the abstract, without reference to the content that advertising supports and makes available. It's the kind of woolly-headed socialism that college students love to talk when tuition comes up.
The proposition being argued here is "People should not be allowed to consume content unless they have paid for it."
Well, ok, that's too harsh. Probably more like:
"People should not be allowed to choose to consume unwanted content in exchange for consuming content that they want."
Without advertising, Youtube and Twitter are only available on a subscription basis, OTA TV and Radio are limited to government or charities, and newspapers would fail completely.
Once you are talking about narrower restrictions on particular kinds of advertising, there's probably logic there. But capital-A Advertising can't be isolated from the empire built upon it.
No. Collective behavior is very much a thing. The information environment is a commons and ads shit on the commons. One person's behavior very much has a negative externality on the rest.
Would a subscription basis be so bad? Especially, with a massively expanded user base that would drastically reduce costs per-user? And we already have paid equivalents to newspapers (and you yourself pointed out that ads are no longer such a large part of the newspaper revenue stream). And news alternatives (like Substack) are (imo) much better and completely subscription based.
We have a huge surplus of information in this age. I'm not convinced at all that all of it is impossible without ads.
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Go back to the early days of the web before eternal september and you'll pretty much see this. Advertising networks in their current scummy form only appeared when the internet went mainstream.
Which were tiny hobby websites, largely free riding on government and university research investments.
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I was about to say this. Seriously, don't threaten me with a good time. Many of the ills wrought by the Internet are because everyone is on it now, especially children. Kids have no reason to be online, and when they are they are easy targets for groomers, and that results in several poorly-thought-out government-led policy initiatives that are a headache for everyone (e.g. the UK "Online Safety Act"). But is it possible to go back to the early web? I don't know.
No, normies would have the people trying put to death first.
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I do that. That's exactly what I do, along with the ad-free streaming service from the library. I would recommend this to everyone. I actually dislike ads enough that I avoid all the stuff you're talking about in here. I stopped watching sports because the ads were too obnoxious. I think there are in fact many people living this lifestyle, but you would only know about this by meeting them or asking about it.
FWIW, I also drop like a hot potato anything that includes advertisements. I don't think this is representative of any larger number of people doing the same.
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Which lifestyle was achieved with zero government involvement, outside of the taxes paid to the public library!
I'm pretty sure that everyone who wants an ad-free internet also supports taxes funding public libraries (up to lizard-man's constant).
Honestly, I've never seen a library funding proposal I didn't think should be higher. It's literally price discrimination executed to perfection.
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This reasoning violates conservation of expected evidence. You can't have "people avoid ads" and "people don't avoid ads" be evidence for the same thing.
How else does one model evidence based on consumer choice than by pointing to two options, understanding the tradeoffs between them, and charting what choices people make to see how highly people value those tradeoffs?
If consumers had no choice and could only consume content with ads, that would only tell us that they like the content more than they dislike the ads. NFL OTA broadcasts would fall in this category, viewers are making a decision based on ads. Add choices and we can narrow it down. We can say that Youtube users dislike ads at a value less than $14/month or whatever it is for premium. And we can say that the degree to which most people like having content from ad-supported platforms more than they like getting content from their local library > their degree of dislike of ads.
But that's not what you're doing. First you're claiming that if people don't avoid ads, that's evidence that we don't need to ban ads. Now you're claiming that if people do avoid ads, that's evidence that we don't need to ban ads. It is impossible for X and not-X to be evidence for the same thing.
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The argument is that different people have different preferences with respect to ads. Some people don't really mind them and will accept them in exchange for cost savings. Other people hate ads and have the option to make choices to avoid them. Thus the current system allows everyone to satisfy their preferences reasonably well. A system that banned ads would only allow one of these groups to satisfy their preferences.
Replace "ads" here with "pollute the commons" and notice that the argument doesn't really change. Yes, if you pollute the commons, some people will make expenditures to avoid being harmed by the polluted commons and some will not. That doesn't justify polluting the commons.
Content produced and hosted on private platforms isn't the commons.
That's a bit of a dodge, don't you think? When everyone uses them, they are practically the commons. Youtube is a good example, having network effects so profound that no one dares even think about hosting their own video distribution website. Even the creators on there are called "Youtubers" which underlines how much they are tied to the platform.
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I do wonder what a more convincing version of this for the modern internet would look like. Like, the idea there is some reflexivity that negates some of the utilitarian arguments for capitalism is not new. There is extensive literature:
It does also seem like several of the most obvious threads were not addressed. MotteAnon12345:
Um, if internet ads bother you → ad-block?
Doesn't deal with the second deeper problem I highlighted which is polluting the information commons.
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Ad block is an easy price-discrimination tool, but it's not as comprehensive as the ban desires it to be, and ad block presents significant free-rider and tragedy of the commons problems on a societal basis, an argument I didn't want to get into again here.
But yeah, ad block solves at least half of the problem for anyone who cares enough to do it.
Rereading what I wrote, I was pretty unclear.
More explicitly: yes, I agree. The economic and ethical considerations of ad-block are non-trivial and annoying to constantly rehash. From a practical perspective, if you are so inclined to absolutely hate advertising, using an ad blocker, or just paying a trivial amount of money (for an upper-middle-class consumer) for premium service, seems eminently more feasible than trying to figure out how to ban advertising outright.
I already pay for quite a few such services. It's nowhere near enough and still doesn't address the marketing arms race that adds cost to virtually every single consumer product currently in existence.
I assume it was someone else who said they were a Gmail user? YouTube and Gmail are both extremely common and valuable consumer products. Equivalent levels of email service were and are much more expensive if not ad supported. YouTube provides you access to more media for free than you could ever consume, far more than premium paid services like pay-per-view or classic HBO. You can use both ad-free if you want to pay for the premium version or are okay with ad-block. There is clearly a category of products that is cheaper because of being subsidized by advertising.
To address your other point about polluting the information commons: it is a simple fact of life that the information commons is polluted in far more pernicious ways. People once espoused the idea that an object’s acceleration under gravity was a function of its mass. This was the accepted wisdom of both experts and the masses. There is wrong information out there. It's up to you to figure out what to believe; there's no oracle to consult for truth. Except, if you want to filter out advertising, then there is an oracle, and the pollution is trivial to filter out. A machine can literally do it. Ad-block at the browser or DNS level has nearly perfect accuracy.
You also assert that this hinges on:
It's not at all shown that this is a zero-sum game and that advertising is net negative in sign. The marginal cost of actually delivering the advertisements on the internet rounds to zero. The question, then, is where the dollars used to produce and target ads would have gone. If your counterfactual is curing cancer, sure, but that seems unlikely. If the marginal dollar goes into producing Lululemon as a status and social signaling device which simultaneously makes my wife's butt look good, that has positive utility to me. If the counterfactual is my tax dollars go to support yet another starving artist who would have been a marketer at Lululemon, that's net negative utility to me.
I hate advertisements too. So I pay for services I value and ad-block everywhere else, because FM, they're still getting the analytics at least. I don't think anyone needs to come and save me from advertisements, and I don't think enforcing any sort of ban would be at all practical. Your assertion that it would be practical assumes:
No, these are just the most annoying ads to you. Guerrilla advertising and astroturfing are real things. And no, ads in general are not "noticeable" to normies; they are just part of the background fabric of life. Have you ever watched a normie browse the web? There are advertisements that would make my eyes bleed, but they just scroll along happy as a clam. They do not feel bothered by them in the same way you or I feel bothered by them.
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I value anonymity enough that I'm not going to give out my credit card information, tying my account to my real life identity, just to remove ads. That information is begging to be leaked in a data breach anyway.
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OP's war on ad-supporter platforms presumably also hits GMail and all the free email hosting alternatives. Honestly, it does worry me that those have piecemeal become load-bearing parts of the economy: I need it to reset the account password for my bank.
On the other hand, I'm not anxious to retvrn to the days of email addresses tying you to your ISP: "DSL now more expensive than the alternatives, but it's the email address I use for everything like my bank accounts." I'm not sure who else I'd want to host email (honestly: USPS? Not the greatest alternative), and I can't see masses of normies paying for Proton Mail or such.
If it wasn't for all the anti-spam measures, I'd host my own email servers in a heartbeat (I already host my own website, code repos, etc...). And I do think services like email should be part of a personal cloud offering. It wouldn't cost more than a dollar or two a month (per user) to run once it achieves scale. It would also have much better privacy behavior because the user would actually be the customer.
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Hell, go back even further. Roman gladiators were paid to do product endorsements. Ridley Scott hired a team of historians to jazz up the movie Gladiator, and they were planning to depict this, but figured that audiences would have a hard time taking it seriously even though it's true.
I thought about that, but I too felt like it was a bit of a reach!
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There is no way this is feasible to implement in a well-defined way. There are too many incredibly powerful incentives to find loopholes that the only way you'll close them down is by being so strict and draconian that you prohibit regular behavior. You won't be able to tighten the definitions without strangling the life out of them. Just taking what you've defined here, off the top of my head:
-What if party A advertises their own product on their own website without involving "Party B"? If that's not allowed you'll strangle all sorts of regular behavior. But if they are then now you have an incentive for companies to share ownership of streaming websites and create monopolies under one umbrella. Amazon owns Twitch, can they advertise Amazon products on Twitch? Because then everyone selling anything is going to want to use Amazon to list their products so that it can be advertised there. If you try to prohibit that by saying Twitch streamers count as "Party B" because they aren't official Amazon employees then Amazon will hire them as official employees. If you try to prohibit that by saying "Twitch and Amazon marketplace are different websites" then Amazon will merge them and annoyingly integrate them together enough to loophole whatever your law is. If you say "Amazon can't have their employees advertise for them" then nobody can do anything unless they're privately owned and the CEO designs their own website without hiring any employees, which is ridiculous.
The spirit of the law is clear, but you can't enforce the spirit of the law. You can only enforce the letter, and anything where a company is allowed to do their own advertising on their own platforms just encourages consolidation and rewards megacorps at the expense of all the small people. I suspect that if you try to add epicycles to close these loopholes then the megacorps will pay thousands of dollars to clever people who will work harder than the 5 minutes I spent here and find cleverer loopholes. Lobbying, free gifts and perks, wink wink nudge nudge, favors traded between supposed rivals, etc. We can't even keep money out of politics, we're not going to keep money out of advertising. Any attempts to do so are inevitably going to be 10% intended benefit and 90% collateral damage.
I don't think this is true. You can embed pragmatic judgements into laws or have them happen in regulatory agencies. We already have laws about undisclosed advertisements in various contexts, which requires defining advertisements. There would absolutely be attempts to work around the laws, but said workarounds would probably be less annoying and less frequent than ads currently are, so that'd still be an improvement. Especially if you don't try to ban all advertising, which is really pretty absurd, but just ban excessive advertising for some sort of specific sense of excessive.
That's specifically what I'm arguing against here. I'm not saying the problem of advertising is completely hopeless and impossible to regulate, my point is that a complete ban is doomed to failure because it will either be too lax on things you intend to block OR too strict on things you don't.
Incentives are like the water pressure in a set of pipes, or a river. If you block off some of the outlets and leave others unblocked then the water will flow down the direction that you left unblocked. If you block of every outlet the pressure will build until it finds an outlet and burst/overflow in some unforseen place. When a lot of people really really really want something, oftentimes even if you don't want them to have that it's often useful and/or necessary to let them have some version of it if only to release the pressure in a more manageable way. You have to do that by being clever, not by being blunt and heavyhanded.
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This is a rather extreme and unlikely example because combining services like this dramatically degrades the quality of the service. If the only way for me to get coke is to wade through a pile of unrelated garbage because the company's interface makes it impossible for me to express my intent (because that would trigger the anti-marketing laws), I'm going somewhere else.
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Isn't jury of one's peers in essence trying to enforce spirit of the law instead of enforcing the letter?
Juries are capital S Stupid in the 21st century. Place like Singapore abolished them long ago without any problems.
Is it really reasonable for 12 randos with an average IQ of 100 to be deciding on whether a certain pharmaceutical company invention made by a team of Chemistry PhDs is infringing on this patent developed by that other team of Chemistry PhDs? There is a correct answer here, and it is No.
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Courts instruct juries on the meaning of the law, then the jury is supposed to apply that meaning to the facts. So, at least in theory, the jury is not supposed to be determining the meaning of the law.
More importantly, jury trials are extremely expensive, and companies want to know what's legal and what's illegal without having to spend ungodly amounts of time and money litigating in Court. Clearly written laws save a lot of money and are easier and cheaper to enforce.
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Sort of. But if you're constantly tangling people up in the courts over technicalities the way this would you've already failed. If people are breaking the letter of the law and only getting by by the good graces of juries then that's just further incentives for corporations to virtue signal and get entangled in the culture war to make people side with them.
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This seems unnecessarily defeatist. The law is ultimately semi-formalised human judgements, and humans are perfectly capable of making judgements without rigid rubrics. You just need a 'safe zone' of examples that are fine, a 'lawless zone' of examples that are not fine, and a 'here be dragons' zone in between. The reason that megacorps frolic so happily is that lawyers are too lawyer-brained to actually apply the spirit of the law when working out loopholes in the letter of it is so much more fun and rewarding, and because governments don't actually want to apply it. When they do want to apply it, suddenly the corps fall in line.
Except a major strain of liberalism (I keep going back to what Michael Munger said in an interview as an example, where he compared all power and authority to the One Ring) holds that, no, human judgement can't be trusted, not in matters of governance, and that the whole liberal project — Weber's "rationalization" and "bureaucratization" — is about replacing all human judgement, in matters of authority, with procedure. With algorithms, based in "rigid rubrics," with no exceptional cases, such that any human beings remaining in government are quality-agnostic carbon hardware upon which that software runs, like the man in Searle's Chinese room. "I don't make the rules, I just follow them" and all that. A set of algorithms so complete, so perfect in aligning incentives, that, per Kant, they can produce optimal outcomes even from a "society of rational devils." Systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, as T.S. Eliot put it.
(And isn't fully formalized human (moral) judgements the aim of "alignment"?)
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But if you make any mistake in your 'safe zone' that's still effectively a loophole. How do you let Coca Cola link you to their shop with a bunch of products and merchandise on their own website (which I expect you intend since it's "opt in") but not allow Amazon to link you to their shop and products during a Twitch stream on their own website? (which I expect you don't intend, because even though you've opted into a Twitch stream you didn't intend to opt into the Amazon store)
Keeping in mind that you can't just take the state of the world as it exists right now this very instant, you have to draw the categories in a way that fundamentally cannot be worked around? If the law says "you can only advertise your own products on your own website" then the Lawyers don't need to do anything, they've already won because you forgot the websites are owned by the same company (and they could just as easily have made them the same website). There's no infraction of the law for the government to enforce because they're not breaking the law, it's just badly written.
How do you make it stronger without accidentally crushing normal people just trying to honestly sell things?
That's how. Like, Amazon and Twitch are separate brands and people use them for separate things, and everybody with eyes can see that. It's not a grand political dilemma like the Minneapolis car incident.
The 'safe zone' is 'you make cola and you advertise your own cola'. The bad zone is 'you run an advertising agency'. 'you make cola but you advertise life insurance from your life insurance subsidiary' is well within 'here be dragons' and you're risking serious issues. It's like when you threaten massive fines for disinformation and everyone bans anything that could even possibly look like something government might consider disinfo. You don't actually have to tolerate autistic winkling out of loopholes.
Could you give some examples? My model of the world is broadly 'if people want what you are trying to sell, they will go looking for it'. If people buy something and they like it, they tell their friends or they write reviews (I am okay with free samples to review sites etc.). But the idea that 'no, you don't know you want this yet' is IMO a lie that advertisers and salesmen tell themselves and deserves very short thrift.
This is BAD. This is a bad outcome! This is exactly what I'm afraid of. Nobody was allowed to question the Covid vaccine or masking or any sort of government approved narrative on social media because it might possibly be construed as disinformation. The chilling effect caused by ambiguous rules that might or might not be arbitrarily enforced on a whim is bad. The ability for the government to selectively target anyone they dislike for rules that normal people occasionally violate because they're not quite sure where the boundary gives the government an extra cudgel to manipulate people with.
And again, once the boundaries become a little better known this is solved by a little Goodharting to integrate things to be within the boundaries. Ie, Facebook Marketplace is a logical offshoot of Facebook. Stopping them from having, or forcing it to be separate from Facebook would be bad because the networking ability on it is useful for customers. But allowing them to have it would probably also allow them to start selling their own stuff on it. Maybe Amazon makes "Amazon Marketplace", or "Twitchmazon" where Twitch streamers have their own merchandise branded to them just enough that it counts as "their own product" and skirts within your guidelines. Is Pokimane not allowed to have her own cookie company that sells Pokimane cookies? What if Pokimane just happens to be hanging out with some friends (which happen to be filmed because they're all Twitch Streamers) and mentions her own Cookie company? If she is allowed, then you're once again allowing large people to advertise while blocking the little people who don't have a whole team to create advertising and entire companies internally. If that's not allowed then you're restricting the ability for people with cookie companies to even talk about their own product out loud.
95% of the time this is true, but 5% it's not, and that 5% might be disproportionately impactful. Take Uber. Lots of people like Uber. As soon as people found out about Uber they were usually like "that sounds like a good idea". People didn't know they wanted it, because it didn't exist and nothing like it existed, but they did know that they wanted something like that because nobody was happy with Taxi prices or availability.
Uber could not have worked without advertising. The networking effects between drivers and customers do not scale linearly. If you have 1% as many drivers and 1% as many users it's awful because users spend forever waiting to get picked up and drivers spend forever not working and not being paid. It needed to be quickly noticed and adopted or it would have died instantly. A world without advertising is a world where Uber (and all similar rideshare and foodshare apps) that scale nonlinearly would have never been brought to market because they obviously wouldn't have worked. Word of mouth only works on things that people already know about, and if you literally can't advertise anywhere then you can't kickstart that process in the first place.
Or take Ozempic/GLP-1. People didn't know they wanted Ozempic, but people have wanted a weight loss pill that actually works for decades. Advertisements actually did help people here because it's a thing they wanted and looked for and tried and gave up because it didn't exist, and then one day it did exist. The knowledge that the thing they've always wanted but didn't exist suddenly now does exist (in a form they can legally and practically access) is useful knowledge.
Again, I think you're right 95% of the time. And I'm generally in favor of fixing advertising... somehow. But the exceptions exist, and I think a blanket ban is doomed to failure in a way that disproportionately harms smaller and newer people, pushing us even further into the hands of monopolistic megacorps that already exist and everyone already knows about. We need more small businesses and competitors, not fewer.
No, you're making a static world assumption. In a world without marketing, consumer directed information venues would pop up. You would have e.g. magazines (/blogs/whatever) that users paid for that would ferret out interesting new products that their viewers might be interested in. And they would have drastically better incentives.
For example, take Ozempic. I found out about it thanks to ACX. Was he paid by Ozempic companies to put up that post? I don't think so. In a world without ads, there would be medical journals that specifically focused on upcoming treatments with honest evaluations because that's what their revenue source would demand! In fact, even with ads, we already have medical journals that they already have to put in a bunch of effort to make sure they aren't biased by their funding sources.
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https://www.twitch.amazon.com
Whose brand does such a website fall under? Does it change if we switch the word order?
The convention is that it's www.subnet.host.com. So you might have
maps.google.comorauth.google.comorsearch.alphabet.com. If Amazon is acting as a large supercorp providing many services, and Twitch is a provider of streaming, then people ontwitch.amazon.comoramazon.twitch.comare on that site for streaming. If they were there to be sold things they would be onshopping.amazon.comor the reverse.(In today's internet you pay for the xxx.com domain name, but you can subdivide that domain into as many yyy.xxx.com subnets as you want. Doing it the other way round would be incredibly expensive.)
If Twitch and Amazon are both big messy things full of subsidiaries and you are advertising everything everywhere then you are in the realm of 'play stupid games, win stupid prizes' and you should fix your org chart.
The host/domain ordering has always struck me as backwards from pretty much everything else, like file system paths. In fact, URLs are frequently
https://specific.to.general/general/to/specific?veryspecific. I wish I knew why they thought that made sense.So basically, blame DNS.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20120617152945/http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200903/msg00098.html
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I imagine because the practice of selling domains as domain.com came in long before people used subdomains.
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If I slap a popup on my streaming site that directs you to buy shit, guess what, now it's a site for selling shit to you. Seriously what kind of garbage is this? You're going to penalize people over what a court thinks people think the purpose of their website is supposed to be? Give up, you guys just keep digging deeper.
Or you could respect your customers and provide them services they like in exchange for money? Once upon a time, Americans were into that.
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