[keerthiko]

I would argue that limiting the amount of unrequested product evangelism shoved into users' eyeballs is a valuable public and mental health initiative. I wish we could have seen the alternate reality where ad-revenue was not the most lucrative business model for the internet.

[echelon]

Regulation is always too slow and too stupid. By doing this, you'll chase the ads into embedding themselves into the content itself. And that's just the start. Creators are already doing this, and now we're seeing tooling emerge to support it. Wait until the platforms get in on the game.

I say this as a proponent of antitrust regulation against tech giants and a privacy advocate against tracking, storing, and correlating user activity.

Everything needs to be kept in balance. Regulation is a blunt instrument and is better used to punish active rule breaking rather than trying to predict how markets should work.

Break up Google. Don't tell content marketplaces how to run ads. They know their customers far better than old politicians do.

If ads become onerous, alternatives emerge. Different channels, platforms, ad blocking. It's a healthier ecosystem that doesn't grow ossified with decades old legalese. Regulations that actively stymie the creation of new competition.

Now every new video and social startup in Vietnam has to check a bunch of boxes.

[keerthiko]

> By doing this, you'll chase the ads into

IMO regulation never was or is going to force this shift: it's already happening in unregulated ad markets, and is going to keep evolving in that direction because it's simply more effective/lucrative than ads done other ways.

> Break up Google. Don't tell content marketplaces how to run ads.

I'm all for breaking up megacorps, but there's no way a government like Vietnam can effectively accomplish that. The entire regulatory weight of the EU (90% of the non-US first-world consumer base) can't break up Google, so inflicting a series of wristslaps that hurt Google more than any small startup is the best way.

I'm no expert on the region, but I can't imagine a small video/social startup in Vietnam will be hurt more than Google by being forced to show a skip button after 5s on their ads — and generally speaking ads as a business model generally doesn't work all that well or mean much for small startups (<1M MAU), their survival and scalability hinges more on VC money and product-market fit than ad arbitrage.