I'd argue that advertising should not be a tax-deductible business expense. That would discourage overdoing it.
It's always useful to go back to basics: Let's say I'm a teenager and I want to make some money to buy a new bike by mowing lawns. Will I just sit on my front porch and hope that my neighbours will read my mind? Of course not, I'll advertise by knocking on doors or distributing flyers.
Then, targeted advertising is putting flyers only in the mailboxes of houses that have a lawn instead of distributing at random.
Banning advertising altogether is at best an ill-thought-out position, at worst a call to enforce a planned soviet-style economy. Banning targeted advertising does not seem much better (of course the article qualifies this proposed ban as only being "on the basis of pervasive tracking", not general).
Are you ready to pay 5$/month to have access to google search, then 2$/month for hackernews, another 5$ for youtube, and then 3$ for your mail address... ? The web runs on ads
I think that's exactly it - advertisement are unsolicited communication - aka spam.
Outlawing spam does not mean that you cannot communicate with people that choose to listen.
They are not free, you pay for them with everything you buy, with the ad budget share of the price. And you are not only paying for the service you want, you are also paying for the entire ad industry on top of that.
Free services have no reason to exist without advertising.
This is at the very least not obvious. Advertising does, again at least not obviously, increase the amount of money consumers [can] spend. If they shift money to one product, another one will see reduced consumption and get more expensive to manufacture.
Also what prevents one or a few companies from being very successful with their advertisement, becoming a oligopoly or even a monopoly and then inflating the price for more profit and to the disadvantage of the consumers?
I think this is just as muddy as the bits you pointed out. Incumbents don't need to advertise but new players do and they have a better chance to gain market share with targeted advertising due to more effective use of their often limited budgets.
You are of course right, I only wanted to given some scenario with opposite outcome for customers. My point was more that one will have to provide much better arguments or evidence than some random macroeconomic interaction to convince me that advertising has any net positive effect.
And I say this as someone with an instinctual dislike for advertising and practically any sort of opportunistic promotion/marketing.