More insidiously, the proliferation of this type of "junk" crowds out other business models, meaning that increasingly people can't even "test" whether they would prefer something else. It's basically the tyranny of small decisions. It's not just a matter of "I will trade you five minutes of my eyeball time for 6 months of email", because every such transaction increase the likelihood that in the future you will find yourself with no option other than to engage in such a transaction in order to, say, pay your electric bill.
It's my claim that my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values, in the sense that if we considered an alternate universe with less ad junk, more people in that universe would look at ours and say "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there" than vice versa. It's just that there are lots of clever boiling-frog ways to get people to act against their own values without their being fully aware of it. The mere fact that something has happened doesn't mean most people actually wanted it to happen, or are happy it happened, or even realize they would in fact be happier if it hadn't happened.
I assume you're a fan of GDPR banners?
>my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values
It's not hard to install some privacy and adblocking extensions in your browser.
I think you're still doing that thing where you assume others share your values.
The argument has nothing to do with values or imposing them on others, it's simply this: These things are not and never were free. Google wants you to think they're free, but either the ads are effective at driving revenue and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of increased consumption or Google is a parasite that lies to businesses about the efficacy of their ads and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of the parasitic Google tax. Most likely it's a bit of both.
Either way, Google offering these products for "free" did not have a positive effect on consumer wallets and paid solutions emerging to replace Google if it actually does dissolve will not have a negative effect.
I'm fine seeing ads. I wouldn't pay commercial rates for the services I use.
I find ads maybe 20% useful and for me that's a good deal.
The point of the poster above is that you're ultimately paying for your free email with a Google tax on every carton of milk and every smartphone you buy. That is, if advertising were banned and you had to pay for Gmail, most of your other purchases would be just a little bit cheaper, because they wouldn't be paying for Google ads to support your free email.
And this is just basic finance: the advertising budget has to be paid for somehow, so it is priced into the goods themselves (either through higher prices or lower quality, of course).
Modern companies have become very, very good at making consumers believe they are getting a good deal by trading an obvious benefit for the possibility of a hidden harm. The type of data tracked by internet companies is only one form of this.
Economics is the distribution of finite goods amongst infinite desires.
It’s the objective way to optimize an economy given some normative set up.
In the case of advertising, those untrue things are usually "X is a much bigger problem than I thought" and "Y will solve problem X and make my life a lot easier". That you can convince people of these things doesn't make them true in all cases. Washing machines are extremely useful; egg cookers, very much unnecessary. Yet commercials will often look the same for both kinds of products (not for washing machines today, obviously, as the case for why they are useful to have has long since become obvious, and commercials are mostly about which brand is better).
This is an often overlooked thing in discussions about advertising. A major part of the propaganda effort is not "which brand of X should I buy", it's "I need to own an X". That's where they lie to people the most, and convince them to waste money, not on an inferior product, but one that shouldn't have existed at all.
If Google can use targeting advertising to identify customers who eat a lot of eggs, and tell them about the existence of egg cookers, that's a win for everyone except the chickens.
But even if you're right about this being useful to some people, advertising is not the right tool for discovering this: advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative. The goal of advertising, and the incentive, is not to neutrally inform people about products they might use. It's to convince people to buy this product by any means necessary. If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.
Maybe they've got a big kitchen.
>advertising is not the right tool for discovering this
What is the right tool? How would new products find customers without advertising? I think any alternative would be much slower and less effective.
>advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative.
Customers know this. You're underrating how smart customers are.
>If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.
You really think people are stupid and they need someone like you to protect them from their stupidity, huh? Of course advertisers wouldn't do such a thing. It would be terrible for brand equity.
I'm not sure, but I don't think that speed is a major concern here. Even if it becomes harder to introduce new product categories, that would be a small price to pay for stopping the huge waste of money (and CO2) that advertising tries to induce.
Most likely, professional product review sites are a better solution, with a good enough legal framework to prevent them from becoming direct advertising or attack sites. Ultimately, what you need is an impartial expert trying a product and reporting their experience.
> You really think people are stupid and they need someone like you to protect them from their stupidity, huh?
No, I just think systematically lying to people is a bad thing and should be legally discouraged. False advertising is a huge problem, even with laws that try to punish it.
And sure, maybe they wouldn't put those specific claims on every product, but you can bet that without false advertising laws, you'd see much wilder claims in every single ad than you do today.
If the argument is "more ads = more junk" then the argument is essentially "my values are more important than other peoples values". I'm also anti-consumerism, but if someone sees an ad and finds a product intriguing enough to purchase, they believe that thing might have value in their life. We might not agree, but we should not have the ability to control what other people find value in. I think this is equivalent to an argument of coercing people to conform to our values instead of convincing them to have our values.