[YurgenJurgensen]

I've thought about the second problem a lot, and banning ads would solve both ends of the problem. Journalism is in a poor state because of the attention economy, which is to say: because of ads.

Although I'm not in favour of completely banning advertisements, just taxing advertising revenue heavily, as it sidesteps any censorship accusations. The government still lets you say what you want, but you can't become wealthy just by shilling for corpos.

Exceptions will be made in the name of encouraging viable consumer evaluation content, such as review copies, listing fees and suchlike as long as they are clearly stated and meet a stringent set of requirements.

[blagie]

With very rare exceptions (e.g. nuclear weapons), taxation is almost always a better mechanism than outright bans.

Even for pretty bad things (e.g. really toxic pollution), the taxes just need to be set obnoxiously high. By "obnoxiously high," I mean the trade-off might be cleaning up the Great Garbage Patch or removing a billion tons of CO2; something which clearly helps more than the harm done.

For mild things (e.g. device shitification or not having service manuals), even very modest taxes can help (e.g. a few pennies per device), without throttling innovation. In a commodity market of Chinese off-brands, a few pennies is enough to make-or-break a vendor.