I had this idea before, but thinking about it, you very soon run into some pretty uncomfortable tradeoffs.
The internet would change fundamentally. The article lists social networks as things that would disappear, and good riddance, but we'd also lose (free) search engines.
Further, I'd argue that some forms of advertising are actually desirable. If I'm planning a vacation abroad, and want to make a reservation at a hotel, I'd typically go to booking.com or one of it's competitors. Those sites are pretty much 100% advertising, but how else am I gonna find a hotel on the other side of the planet, in a country I've never been before?
You also run into some tricky hairsplitting questions. Where do you draw the line on advertising? Are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? Or is that advertising? I don't want to outlaw online shopping entirely, it's extremely handy! What about search engine results from those webshops? Free search engines will disappear, but let's say I have a paid account and search for "buy dell laptop". Are the results advertising? How do you differentiate and define the cases legally?
I think it's a good idea, but it's gonna be quite tricky to implement well. And executing this idea poorly is potentially quite bad.
Getting it implemented at all is going to be hard: even well executed, this idea is going to have a huge impact on the economy, and people are not going to like that. This idea would be good for democracy, but ironically democracy is not good for this idea.
Already solved elsewhere in the thread: Ban unsolicited advertising. Product recommendations in places where the consumer is explicitly visiting to get product recommendations are not unsolicited.
Can product recommendation sites place a funny video on their website, unrelated to products, just so readers can have a little rest while doing all this product comparison?
Can product recommendation sites _pay_ a video creator to create a funny video for their website? It's a win-win for everyone, right? Product recommendation website gets more visitors, popular creator gets money, and visitors get to see a funny video from popular creator.
If you allow ads on product recommendation websites, most entertainment websites will declare themselves "product recommendation".
What matters is solicitation, which is fairly easy to evidence. Running successful entertainment business while pretending to be a consumer advice business sounds pretty hard, since you still can’t take money for product endorsement, you can’t SEO for your real purpose, and you can’t promote your real purpose. And somewhat pointless, as you’re running a paid subscription service either way, so your funny video site would probably get more customers if it could claim to be a funny video site.
I doubt this. more likely we'd end up in a scenario where, as a way of capturing market share, large companies subsidise their search engine with other branches of their business, for example, hosting. also since we're speaking hypothetically about government interventions, there's no reason that a government couldn't set up a publicly owned search engine, in fact one may already exist, I don't know
>Further, I'd argue that some forms of advertising are actually desirable. If I'm planning a vacation abroad, and want to make a reservation at a hotel, I'd typically go to booking.com or one of it's competitors. Those sites are pretty much 100% advertising, but how else am I gonna find a hotel on the other side of the planet, in a country I've never been before?
it's not advertising if it's on their own website
>You also run into some tricky hairsplitting questions. Where do you draw the line on advertising? Are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? Or is that advertising? I don't want to outlaw online shopping entirely, it's extremely handy! What about search engine results from those webshops? Free search engines will disappear, but let's say I have a paid account and search for "buy dell laptop". Are the results advertising? How do you differentiate and define the cases legally?
these are very simple dilemmas:
are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? yes, because you're on a webshop. practically all shops sell 3rd party products. advertising is listing products and services on non-commercial public places where people haven't chosen to engage with products
you search for "buy dell laptop", and the search engine has to produces the results that naturally bubble to the top from its algorithm
the issue I'd be more worried about with banning advertising is taking away the freedom it can allow small creators on places like Youtube, where now suddenly they'd be relying on subscriptions and/or donations, which can be a lot harder to come by than baseline advertising revenue. you'd get a lot more begging and pleading, and you'd get a lot more creators needing to rely on working under the umbrella of a larger organisation like they did before the internet
> I'd typically go to booking.com or one of it's competitors
Thats the difference, you opted into the advertising by visiting a website which catalogs hotels. I think most people are against “push” advertising where you are fed an ad for something you were not looking for.
The internet would change fundamentally. The article lists social networks as things that would disappear, and good riddance, but we'd also lose (free) search engines.
Further, I'd argue that some forms of advertising are actually desirable. If I'm planning a vacation abroad, and want to make a reservation at a hotel, I'd typically go to booking.com or one of it's competitors. Those sites are pretty much 100% advertising, but how else am I gonna find a hotel on the other side of the planet, in a country I've never been before?
You also run into some tricky hairsplitting questions. Where do you draw the line on advertising? Are webshops allowed to list 3rd party products? Or is that advertising? I don't want to outlaw online shopping entirely, it's extremely handy! What about search engine results from those webshops? Free search engines will disappear, but let's say I have a paid account and search for "buy dell laptop". Are the results advertising? How do you differentiate and define the cases legally?
I think it's a good idea, but it's gonna be quite tricky to implement well. And executing this idea poorly is potentially quite bad.
Getting it implemented at all is going to be hard: even well executed, this idea is going to have a huge impact on the economy, and people are not going to like that. This idea would be good for democracy, but ironically democracy is not good for this idea.