I can't think of a less bad alternative to billboards, so I don't disagree with your claim, but I'll say that I didn't realize how much billboards suck until I spent time driving in Vermont, where they're banned. (I'm originally from Wisconsin, where the freeways have billboards for sex shops, CBD, fireworks, and fetuses every few hundred feet.) The driving experience is so much better without them that I'm pretty confident in saying that their negative externalities are dramatically higher than their economic value and the only reason they exist is that those externalities are externalized.

It's absurd that we're so dedicated to the god of Capitalism that we've had to invent a special term ("negative externalities") to describe the basic premise of ethics - "being selfish is bad".

The "economic value" of billboards shouldn't even be a question. It's self-evident that billboards benefit the owner of the billboard at the expense of everyone else. Nobody looks at an empty patch of sky and wishes there were an advertisement there instead.

That's a pretty dramatic change, as far as billboards go. I think most of the rest of the northeast still has billboards, but they are for, like, normal products.

Pretty much none of the country has billboards for "normal products" these days. They're either advertising a local establishment (i.e. "McDonalds! next exit!"), or they're advertising something that the TV networks/AdSense/Facebook wouldn't allow them to (i.e. CBD or sex shops or random religious nutjobmania).

No. The northeast has plenty of anti-abortion, sex shops, fireworks, CBD/marijuana (MM is legal in PA - any state with legalized dispensaries will have these billboards.

Don’t know what you consider a normal product but for truckers and people coming from NY adult stores and fireworks are “normal”

I do agree that the privacy invading stuff is a more urgent problem. But I want to add a counterpoint about the physical ads. I remember when they banned all the billboards in São Paulo and the city ended up looking much better after it. The change ended up being highly regarded by the residents.

Counterpoint:

You can escape online advertising by walking away from the computer.

There's nowhere you can walk to escape physical advertising. Maybe the desert.

Online advertising stalks you even if you're not looking at the ads. Opting out of online advertising basically means you need to go live in the woods and never interact with modern society again. Every interaction you'd have with technology will have something to do with ads one way or another, even if just buying paid products in a physical store thanks to Bluetooth/Wi-Fi MAC address tracking, face recognition, not to mention loyalty cards (but at least you can opt-out of that one).

>Opting out of online advertising basically means you need to go live in the woods and never interact with modern society again

No, it just means you need to not open a web browser, or install an ad blocker. Opting out of physical advertising literally means this. I'm not saying that online advertising isn't bad, but physical advertising is inescapable. Your very food packaging is covered in it. The real world has primacy here, because you live in it and can't turn it off.

That would destroy 90% of the tech industry.

Sure but there's probably a downside as well.

fucking lol. I think it'd suck for us have our SWE salaries crash down to non-tech levels. Making $140k after 10 years of experience at Google, oof. Tech VC's drained, how will I start my dog therapist app? But yeah, massive net benefit to society. Housing returning to normal levels, cities with blended cultures of white/blue collar and art workers.

It would destroy 90% of the current version of the tech industry.

I find it hard to believe that a better version isn't possible.

the AD industry. it would destroy the AD industry.

they've been so successful in their advertising they've just managed to get people to call them "tech".

tech would probably be untouched, and who knows, might even flourish a bit once people stop wasting their time and paycheques to make the world a worse place.

Good.