Why not just ban all ads?
I'd love a world without advertising, but it's never going to happen. But a world without profile-targeted advertising could.
i think the sentiment against ads from the educated bubble really completely takes a working democracy for granted. spoiler: its not and look whats happening in the US... and the budget shift from openweb/newspapers towards video (mainly google) in the advertising industry is massive...
disclaimer: i work in adtech but we do not profile users and do not track them.
The advertising industry at large is at fault for our degradation in journalism.
Advertising needs clicks and eyes, the providers produce highly targeted profile algorithms to ensure maximum clicks and eyes, which degrades the information conveyed into the smallest, most enraging snippets possible. Those rise to the top as the most profitable ways to convey information, and continues the cycle, further destroying news that doesn't profit in this ecosystem.
Killing most forms of advertising across the board would of course basically destroy these large tech companies that rely on them. But the same companies have completely derailed society with their "services". We'd be better off without them.
Of course this would likely hurt "GDP" and "The Economy", but that would just mean we have an unproductive economy primarily inflated by a pointless circle of advertisement.
what degraded the journalism in my view is consumer shift towards UGC and social media (which in turn is ad funded and drew away advertiser budgets, leaving the Journalistic outlets with low(er) quality ads).
but its a rather complex topic and possibly all views here are too simplistic
The press has largely depended on ads since the 17th century. The revenue from subscriptions and individual paper sales typically only covered about 20% of the costs.
There was 75 or more years of media ads that had no feedback except when very explicitly asking (Nielsen). Everyone was making money and doing just fine.
But how would you actually do it? Ban the exchange of money for delivering specific messages? I guess it could work. It would require judgement calls, but we have other laws that require even more subtle judgement calls.