[runarberg]

I am not a legislator, nor an expert in consumer law, and there is no way I could think of a regulation against targeted advertising, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible. I think claiming it to be impossible demonstrate a lack of imagination. And I would even think some consumer protection, or privacy advocacy groups have already drafted some legislation outlines for regulating targeted ads (as I said, I’m not an expert, and wouldn’t even know where to begin looking for one [maybe the EFF?]).

> There isn't an inherent power imbalance that exists between the company and their customers

That is very simplistic, and maybe idealistic from an unrealistic view of free-market capitalism. But there is certainly an inherent power imbalance. Before leaded gasoline was banned, it was extremely hard for environmentally conscious consumer to make the ethical choice and buy unleaded gasoline. Before seatbelts were required, a safety aware consumer might still have bought a car without one simply because the cars with seatbelts were either unavailable or unaffordable. Those aren’t real choices, but rather choices which are forced onto the consumer as a result of the competitive environment where the consumer hostile option generates much more revenue for the company.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I am not a legislator, nor an expert in consumer law, and there is no way I could think of a regulation against targeted advertising, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.

The hard part isn't the rule, it's the enforcement.

To begin with, banning targeted advertising isn't really what you want to do anyway. If you have a sandwich shop in Pittsburgh and you put up billboards in Pittsburgh but not in Anchorage, you're targeting people in Pittsburgh. If you sell servers and you buy ads in a tech magazine, you're targeting tech people. I assume you're not proposing to require someone who wants to buy ads for their local independent pet store to have nearly all of them shown to people who are on the other side of the country?

What you're really trying to do is ban the use of individualized tracking data. But that's extremely difficult to detect, because if you tell Facebook "show this ad to people in Miami", how do you know if it's showing them to someone because they're viewing a post likely to be popular with people in Miami in general vs. because the company is keeping surveillance dossiers on every individual user?

The only thing that actually works is for them not to have the data to begin with. Which is the thing where you have to empower user agents to provably constrain what information services have about their users, i.e. adversarial interoperability.

> That is very simplistic, and maybe idealistic from an unrealistic view of free-market capitalism.

It's a factual description of competitive markets.

> Before leaded gasoline was banned, it was extremely hard for environmentally conscious consumer to make the ethical choice and buy unleaded gasoline.

The ban on leaded gasoline isn't a consumer protection regulation, it's an environmental regulation. Gas stations weren't selling leaded gasoline in spite of customers preferring unleaded, they were selling it because it was cheaper to make and therefore what customers preferred in the absence of a ban. It's a completely different category of problem and results from an externality in which the seller and the buyer both want the same thing but that thing harms some third party who isn't participating in the transaction.

> Before seatbelts were required, a safety aware consumer might still have bought a car without one simply because the cars with seatbelts were either unavailable or unaffordable.

This is how safety features evolve.

Seat belts were invented in the 19th century but we didn't start getting strong evidence of their effectiveness until the 1950s and 60s. Meanwhile that's the same period of time the US started building the interstate system with the corresponding increase in vehicle ownership, and therefore accidents.

So into the 1960s there was an increasing concern about vehicle safety, the percentage of cars offered with seat belts started increasing, and then Congress decided to mandate them -- which is what the market was already doing, because the customers (who are largely the same people as the voters) were demanding it.

That is a consistent trend. Things like that get mandated just as the majority of the market starts offering them, and then Congress swoops in to take credit for the benefit of what was already happening regardless.

What those laws really do is a) increase compliance costs (and therefore prices), and b) prohibit the minority of customers from buying something for specific reasons which is different than what the majority wants, because it's banned. For example, all cars are now required to have anti-lock brakes, but ABS can increase stopping distances on certain types of terrain. A professional driver who is buying a vehicle for specific use on those types of terrain is now prohibited from buying a vehicle without ABS on purpose even though it's known to cause safety problems for them.

> Those aren’t real choices, but rather choices which are forced onto the consumer as a result of the competitive environment where the consumer hostile option generates much more revenue for the company.

That type of choice is the thing that specifically doesn't happen in a competitive market, because then the consumer goes to a competitor.

Where it does happen is in uncompetitive markets, but in that case what you need is not to restrict the customer's choices, it's to increase competition.