[hansvm]

Banning push-based advertising isn't without its merits. I'd be surprised if the majority of sales made via push-based advertising which wouldn't have been made in a pull-based system are actually beneficial to the end user (loosely measured by some combination of regret and opportunity cost), and a system that exists purely to extract value from the populace is not worth keeping around in my opinion, especially as a roundabout and inefficient method of payment.

I think most of the downsides would be in second-order effects (like the paywall bit you pointed out) and in effective enforcement (advertising dollars might just shift to realistic-looking review sites for example). I'm hopeful that free content would still be produced, especially given that for my own personal use I've noticed that ads correlate negatively with quality, and with a few exceptions like academic publishing all the best content is free and without ads even in today's world where it's easy to ad ads to a site.

[CydeWeys]

How exactly are you using the terms "push-based" and "pull-based" advertising here? Are you describing "opt-in" vs "opt-out"? I.e. all advertising would be made illegal unless the user explicitly consented to seeing it, which could be done in exchange for free access to services?

It's an interesting idea, but I don't see how it'd be compatible with e.g. the first amendment (especially the unfortunate recent ruling in Citizens United).

And I'm curious as to what exactly your system would look like in regards to such currently ad-supported services as Google Maps, Gmail, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Would your expectation be that most of these would have to become subscription or pay-per-use services with no free tier? Because I don't see any world in which all of the free services would continue to exist as-is without any ability to monetize themselves through advertising revenue.

[hansvm]

> How exactly are you using the terms "push-based" and "pull-based" advertising here? Are you describing "opt-in" vs "opt-out"? I.e. all advertising would be made illegal unless the user explicitly consented to seeing it, which could be done in exchange for free access to services?

Slightly stronger still -- all advertising would be made illegal unless the user explicitly sought it out (e.g. searching for things to buy on Amazon, searching for product recommendations, etc....).

> It's an interesting idea, but I don't see how it'd be compatible with e.g. the first amendment (especially the unfortunate recent ruling in Citizens United).

It might not be legally feasible. I know there are places (in the US, since we're invoking the first amendment) which ban billboards, ban specific kinds of ads (e.g. excessively misleading), ban certain ad-location pairings (e.g. no cigarettes targeting children), and so on, so I'm not totally convinced a motivated party couldn't push it through, but that's not my area of expertise.

> And I'm curious as to what exactly your system would look like in regards to such currently ad-supported services as Google Maps, Gmail, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Would your expectation be that most of these would have to become subscription or pay-per-use services with no free tier? Because I don't see any world in which all of the free services would continue to exist as-is without any ability to monetize themselves through advertising revenue.

Haha, that system doesn't define how those services would work at all -- the idea is that from some kind of first principle (the hypothetical assertion is that push-based ads offer little societal value and large detriments above and beyond the effects of pull-based ads, so they're worth removing) we decide that push-based ads ought to be removed, and any second-order consequences are justified as a response. That's definitely the point I'd attack if I wanted to shoot this idea down, because even with seemingly clear-cut behaviors like killing people we still have to carve out exceptions in the law for all the unforeseen consequences of simply making killing illegal.

I hesitate to speculate too far as to how the market might react if such a law were enacted (and not easily circumvented), but some possible options include:

1. Some of those services (e.g., Snapchat seems vulnerable to that change) would cease to exist, and the companies involved would die or regroup around their other offerings. Not all products are viable in all market conditions.

2. Some others would probably be largely unaffected. Google might double down on "shopping" and other kinds of searches that are legally classified as pull-based and still offer a breadth of services to collect data on you (to offer better results for when you do make pull-based ad queries) and to keep you trapped in their ecosystem so that you can't go to a competitor. Their fee structure for results in those subsystems might change drastically.

3. Some businesses that have an ad-supported free tier _might_ keep that free tier as a way to entice users into paid offerings. E.g., YouTube would drop their ads due to the legal requirement but potentially also limit some other product features to try to convert more people to premium, above and beyond the pay-walling they already do.

4. Many smaller free services already only exist as a charity, a hobby, or some other kind of not-my-primary-source-of-income venture. At first glance I don't think those would be much affected, but if free tiers in AWS and GCP or github actions or whatnot are reduced then that could have downstream consequences.

5. If push-based advertising were banned cold-turkey then it's not totally implausible that we'd finally get mass acceptance around some workable micropayment solution. That _might_ even be integrated with a credit system from some pull-based ad behemoth.

6. Those services might well convert to subscription or pay-per-use. That's prohibitive now in many scenarios because somebody will produce an ad-based competitor, but if that's illegal then you only have to worry about competitors who are actually producing services for free somehow, not those who are producing services for <wink> "free" <wink>. If enough people actually want to produce free services then the ability to monetize goes away, but the need to monetize also goes away since the whole argument about monetization is that we need it to entice people to create stuff. Otherwise, there's still a monetization opportunity, and we can actually charge for the services we build.

And so on. It's really hard to speculate as to what might happen because we're talking about disrupting a $200B-$300B/yr industry. That'll have a sizable impact and quite a few ripples as we reach a new equilibrium.