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(Does this count as CW? Happy to post it somewhere else if that would be more appropriate.)
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?
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 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?
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.
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