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Comment by oehpr | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you. And I suspect 9 out of 10 doctors do as well.

I want to neuter advertising more than anything, but I can't think of any kind of "rule" we could establish that would make public mind hacking illegal.

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Maybe we're focused too much on the content of the advertising rather than methodology of advertisement. First and foremost advertising is paid speech, that is speech that would not otherwise be made if one party was not being compensated in some way or another. Obviously this definition has tons of edge cases, but it's a good starting point IMO.

While all of those coca cola ads are "true", they would be limited in scope to places that coca cola owns. So no bus stations or taxi toppers or whatever, unless they buy a fleet of taxis.

What if we mandated that companies can only use their revenues for the company's purpose or given to the shareholders? I consider "ads" on company property part of the company's purpose here as they're necessary so the customer knows what company they're dealing with.

- Ads would be implicitly banned.

- Coca Cola couldn't bypass this rule by buying a taxi fleet because they aren't a taxi company.

- Newspapers could still operate even though journalists get paid for speech.

It could also help against other problems, depending on how narrow the purpose of a company has to be:

- ISPs have no incentive to violate net neutrality by privileging their own value added services (streaming etc) because their ISPs not streaming providers.

- If you subscribe to a folder that syncs you know that it will remain a folder that syncs. The behind it won't pivot to something you neither want not need, bloating the software till it bursts.

- Similarly: No incredible journeys anymore. Products don't get discontinued because they get in the way of $CORPORATION's plans.

- Chosing services because they aren't owned by Facebook actually works.

- Open protocols would be a thing again if we decouple clients and services. Edge case: Someone initially has to develop a client, a server and the protocol.

The idea is that by separating concerns, we enable customers to decide where their money goes and to freely chose between goods and services without getting artificially locked into any corporation's ecosystem.

Some rules would go a long way, for example

1) No depictions of people

2) Advertising only inside stores

you don't need any hardcoded rules. When in doubt have a local municipal office or whatever decide whether to take down ads or not based on residential complaints.

Consensus and some common sense and case by case judgement ought to be enough to decide whether ad placement is appropriate.

This is, of course, the right answer. Unfortunately we are too quick these days to pull out the shotgun when a small razor will do fine.

This doesn't work from a first amendment perspective. The town council is BFE, Mississippi is not going to approach its censor role in a fair way, for better or worse.

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