[TeMPOraL]

I don't see the upside of the crapton of billboards I pass daily, or the flashing, potentially malware-inducing garbage I would see everywhere on the Internet if I turned my ad blocker.

Advertising has ridiculous externalities; this is what makes it similar to the toxic waste scenario.

[cameronbrown]

That's because companies have abused the ecosystem and created all this garbage. The irony is lost on them that they're going to be less profitable because they've devalued ads so much.

I truly believe we can find an equilibrium which works.

[TeMPOraL]

I believe we can find an equilibrium that works too, and that it starts with rolling back almost all advertising "innovation" of the last 100 years.

You'll note the game-theoretical mechanics at play here. If your competitors use garbage advertising, you can't not use it and hope to compete (much like if your competitor is dumping toxic waste to a river, they have advantage over you who tries to safely dispose of it). If one of your competitors invents even more garbagy way of advertising and gains a temporary advantage, everyone will follow suit and the advantage will be cancelled out.

This suggests that simply making it not possible (technically or legally) to engage in garbage advertising won't hurt companies much, and might even be beneficial - companies will still engage in the same competition, but at a cheaper and less invasive level.

There's an anecdote about tobacco companies that I still need to find a proper citation for, but it goes like this: tobacco companies were apparently happy about legal restrictions on advertising, because it was applied to everyone equally, so no one ended up relatively worse off, but now they didn't have to spend so much on advertising anymore.