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by Dracophoenix 1856 days ago
In your vision of it, perhaps. Citizen's United, however, has already decreed that corporations have free speech rights like everybody else. By creating a distinction between commercial and personal speech, the government would be interfering in the 1st amendement rights of personal and commercial entities.
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websites420 1856 days ago
My vision doesn’t create a distinction between commercial and personal speech. In fact, it does the opposite, by not privileging commercial speech and giving it a special space on the page. If you want to advertise you wares, do so, but you don’t get to pay to get attention. Get people to follow you because they like what you have to say.
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Dracophoenix 1856 days ago
When you wrote "having a space for ads and then using behavioral ad targeting would be out", I understood it to mean that you did not want any space at all for ads and not just a lack of designated space for ads.

With that being said, the only way I see this happening is if the government builds its own ISP and /or IXP, secures its own peering agreements (with the understanding that another ISP can refuse), hosts the website on its own servers, and accepts all potential spam that comes from all of its users.

In addition, none of this will stop tracking by ads using tricks like the Facebook Pixel, obfuscated analytics, or fingerprinting scripts as code is also free speech. In fact, none of stops any tracking on server-side by government agents either. Any IP logs or information that's gleaned from user access of government services is understood to be self-incriminating and will be treated as such as in the case of a drug dealer in Massachusetts.[1]

All in all, who is expected to pay for all this (and on what grounds) and how do you intend to stop ads or any tracking at all with these factors involved?

[1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/how-the-usps-tar...

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websites420 1856 days ago
Oh the users would most certainly be tracked by the government. In fact, that's part of the point. One of the unfortunate byproducts of Parler getting shut down was the loss of visibility of right-wing terrorists.

I'm not sure I follow the code-as-free-speech argument, or how it would apply to a government website. The government banned the use of cookies in 2000. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/10/24/r...

It certainly could again.

Of course it would be taxpayer funded.

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