Prohibitions tend to end badly.

I'd like to see a very high taxation on advertising, especially by class or scale.

The local sandwich shop, theatre company, or software consultancy is unlikely to cause much harm and likely to see major benefit by advertising.

The FIRE sectore, fossil fuels and petrochemicals, fizzy drinks, tobacco, alcohol, junk foods, pharmaceuticals, payday lenders and crisis-oriented financial services (granted a subset of FIRE), infomercials, and major-industry influence marketing (effectively political lobbying through advertising), all carry huge externalities and gain tremendous leverage through advertising which a steep taxation rate should ameliorate.

Ads should be replaced by fact sheets, made to objectivly compare products. Instead of advertising agencies, you'd have organisations that compare the greatest number of products, as objectivly as possible.

Probably unrealizable, and riddeled with issues, but ideally preferable.

This already exists. It's what Consumer Reports has been doing since the 1930s.

How do small ones get onto these "fact sheets"? How can a small company be sure that a behemoth company isn't paying off the "objective" fact sheet producer?

In the case of Consumer Reports, it's a nonprofit. All of its financial statements and sources of funding are a matter of public record.

YEA! lets force every ad supported company to force people too pay for content! Nothing bad will happen from that ...

Not only nothing bad will happen from that, plenty of good will happen from that - all the garbage content whose only value is tricking people into viewing ads will disappear from the Internet, making it easier to find good information.

And yes, I'm 100% serious about that. I've been on the Internet for quite a while, and in my experience, trustworthiness of information is very strongly anticorrelated with the amount of ads around it.

The bad effects of advertising are well known. I personally don't think this is too big of a price to pay.

So we should just kick poor people off the internet?

Fun fact - poor people used the internet just fine before 2006.

Did you use the internet before 2006? There was ads... a lot of them honestly more annoying too.

You already need to pay or otherwise go through significant efforts to obtain internet access, yet this somehow doesn't prevent poor people from using the internet? Why is it fine to require payment for internet access but not services on the internet?

Perhaps we agree as a society to pay for universal access to the digital "town square" - collectivize Facebook, Google, etc and pay for it through taxes.

Internet run by government is a million times worse than having to see an ad for Toyota. Get real.

Have you had the unfortunate necessity to use the IRS web site? It's actually fantastic. Getting logged in and authenticated is pretty weird, because you have to put in a credit card number or a loan number, but it's pretty good authentication for the audience.

The web site itself is snappy, well written, and I could do everything using Firefox on Linux. No "IE only" bullshit. Downloads are fast.

I'd give the IRS 10/10, except for the fact that I owe them money.

I had to use the social security website the other day and it wouldn't let me log in after working hours. Told me to try again at 9AM the next day. It's a joke.

You really want the same people in charge of government websites (most recent memory: unemployment applications) to be in charge of facebook/google?

This is awfully reductive of "government." State unemployment offices are shit because no one cares. There are plenty of military and IC data processing web applications that scale just as big and just as reliably as Facebook and Google. It's a matter of priorities. There is nothing inherent about public funding that dooms you to a poor implementation.

Repeating this point ad nauseam does not make it true.

> Doesn't go far enough: since advertising is virtually all lies, we should prohibit it.

This is obviously wrong.

There exist ads that I have been very happy to see and that has saved me lots of money and/or hassle.

But could it have been communicated more effectivly? Ads have a lot of noise, use tricks and are biased. You can't take them at face value, but require additional effort to extract the relevant and real information.