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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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