Not only that, but they were then told to post forced speech by a court not let locations that sell cigarettes.

Whatever, I don't see the difference between PMI/RJR advertising and Anheuser-Busch, and Bayer, and Pfizer, and the US Army, and six car insurance companies all claiming to have the lowest rates and best service.

I kicked television out of my house in 2002. I don't have any streaming services provided by a third party, nor do I really listen to the FM band on my car radio, nor XM. The ads are too many to bear.

Pihole, ad nauseam. If you bypass my pihole, my browser clicks every ad you show and sends the data to /dev/null except what site, timestamp, and a thumbnail of the ad. Its not botting; I'm actively hostile to advertising.

Commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment. Regulations of commercial speech need to pass the "Central Hudson Test", which requires a compelling government interest (subject to heightened scrutiny) and narrowly-tailored regulation. Under this rubric, you can get cigarette ads off billboards, but you probably can't regulate Nike's ads.

If SCOTUS can develop a test to determine when the government is allowed to violate 1A, then they can loosen that test's requirements. They won't, of course, but I don't see why they couldn't, if they wanted to.

Well, that’s great!

> Republican Sen. Susan Collins says Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh told her he views the landmark abortion rights ruling Roe v. Wade as "settled law."

Ah.

Nobody is surprised that a Republican or Democratic nominee might have a strong take regarding Roe v Wade, because it's practically a litmus test for nomination. No nominee has ever been asked about Central Hudson v PSC NY. There's a reason for that. It's been 50 years and 3 different distinct courts and the only thing that seems to have happened with this body of case law is that protections for commercial speech have gotten stronger.

> Nobody is surprised that a Republican or Democratic nominee might have a strong take regarding Roe v Wade, because it's practically a litmus test for nomination.

The point is they'll openly say "settled law" and then immediately unsettle it. "Corporations get free speech" is a concept granted over time (and fairly recently) by the courts, not explicitly laid out in the Constitution. (Doubly so at the state level; it wasn't until the 1920s that SCOTUS even said the First Amendment applied to states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitlow_v._New_York)

> It's been 50 years…

Right about the same amount of time Roe v. Wade stuck around.

Look, this current Court certainly isn't gonna ban advertising; if anything, it's more likely to permit government-required advertisements right into our Neuralink headsets… but a future Court could easily say fast food advertising or social media for minors is just as bad as cigarette advertising was.