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Re:What If We Made Advertising Illegal? by kragen on Saturday April 05, 2025 @05:36PM (#43597002)
> Is ABC allowed to run commercials for its own shows?

Well, not if they pay employees to do it. Except that shows aren't products, they're services, so they'd be exempt from this proposal.

Re:What If We Made Advertising Illegal? by eddythompson80 on Saturday April 05, 2025 @06:09PM (#43597219)
> Except that shows aren't products, they're services, so they'd be exempt from this proposal.

What does that mean? What's a service in this definition? Surely not in the normal definition of a "service", as in health care or tech? Like is a movie a service too?

Or do you just mean something you get for free because it's a show on their own channel? What if you had to pay for shows ala carte?

Re:What If We Made Advertising Illegal? by kragen on Saturday April 05, 2025 @06:49PM (#43597452)
I suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_(economics). Some authors use the term "product" in opposition to "service", while others consider services to be a type of product.

A show isn't made of matter. If you pay for it, you can't take possession of it or resell it later. If you, the buyer, aren't available at the time that it is provided, you get nothing of value out of the deal. These are attributes of services like surgery or internet connectivity, not products like antibiotics and computers. ("Health care" and "tech" are too vague to be useful.)

Getting things for free is not, as you imply, a usual attribute of services.

Re:What If We Made Advertising Illegal? by eddythompson80 on Saturday April 05, 2025 @07:28PM (#43597677)
That makes even less sense than I thought. So things that "are not made out of matter" can be advertised. Like I can advertise YouTube, AWS, Netflix, pretty much 99% of online services, movies, a doctor practice as long as I just do diagnostics, landscaping as long as I just cut and clean. I just can't advertise anything where I'd hand you something "made out of matter". What kind of sense does that make?
Re:What If We Made Advertising Illegal? by kragen on Saturday April 05, 2025 @07:29PM (#43597688)
It makes no sense at all, which was my point. I've criticized it at greater length in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596993.