I would go further and say it’s unlikely any company (most companies?) that don’t have a principle higher than that of making money will properly regulate themselves. At the end of the day these companies have a ‘responsibility’ to share holders, and that primary responsibility is almost always to make as much profit for them as they can.

We need a better system…

Reading this article reminded me of Aesop’s fable: “Belling the cat” aka “Who will bell the cat?'”.

Yes, make advertising illegal but:

1. Who will do it?
2. How will he/she/they do it?
3. What will they gain from stopping it?
4. Won’t people find an alternative way to keep advertising?
5. Won’t this create a black market?

It takes a lot of work to answer these questions and come up with a serious answer. And because it’s hard work, not many people do it.

As interesting as some of these articles look like, beneath the hype induced title and blinding appeals to emotion, they are genuinely devoid of substance.

For anyone with the interest in critical thinking, please check out this article from Farnham Street titled: The Work Required to Have an Opinion:

Ad companies are never going to regulate themselves—it’s like hoping for heroin dealers to write drug laws.

I don’t agree with that. The same way we can punish everyone who live, because they are able to commit a crime. What almost every men have in pants? A “potential rape tool”! So to protect women we should suicide as a civilization?

There are serious movements of very clever people to make some drugs legal. Why? Because the regulated good-quality drugs could be bough without any worries for a penalty. Even if they would be more expensive it’s a big deal for many people.

For sure we are far away from properly regulating even basic food we eat everyday. The problem however is not a country vs “wild market”, because in such case almost always country wins. The problem is with corporations, their ideas to lower prices or to add extra ingredients to cause specific side effects. They point is that the corporations are making a much bigger pressure on the governments using their money in more or less legal way …

That’s said it’s not like that every government in the world is as same completely corrupted from the grounds to the top. The law system, the voting people, the level of propaganda is very different in each country and it gives very different results. It’s a complicated thing with too many variables that a single post can answer all of them.

There are however other problems. Let’s say that we bad marketing. What kind of marketing? Only the paid one? In that case it would not work. A content creator would get a “free” ticket for the vacations and would create a “free” content with “free” recommendations.

So maybe any kind of deal? Sure thing! However now 99.(999999999)% people in the world have a problem. Depending on interpretation each recommendation shared in the internet may become illegal. Even if you agree with that. Do you remember every site and every page

in such site where you remember that you recommended something? Oh, you are not allowed to edit hundreds of posts on each Discourse forum or delete thousands of comments in various other sites? Well … even if you remember … even if you agree to edit that. Now think that almost everyone on this forum would ask Aston to edit many very old posts on the forum. It’s almost impossible to handle each request individually. In that case many site owners would prefer to “simplify” things:

Enum.map(user_reports, fn report ->
  report
  |> get_post_for_report()
  |> Repo.delete()
  # or alternatively
  |> Site.unlist()
end)

What’s the result in practice? Fall of every forum, site with comments, site based on recommendations as the core features they have served is useless. However it’s not the end of the story … The recommendation systems are just a tip of the iceberg. How about review systems?

In a world that nobody can say their opinion on some product/service the review systems would become the only source people may find information about something they are interested. Fine, but … can you prove that every review shared in the internet is fully legal? Oh, it’s based on your personal opinion or your experience? How illegal! That’s no difference with a recommendation! How you dare avoiding law?

In that way depending on the law and the interpretation of it the whole internet may become fully negative. You would hear that everything (following common slang) “sucks”, you would have to search search for the “encrypted” messages that attempts to avoid the censorship system. Each negative word may become a key, so when you compare 2 products you would have to realize what’s the “true” difference between “pointless” and “useless”.

Keep in mind that English language is not hermetic, have many official versions and of course various slang versions. In practice most content creators would decide to change the job and so many services would die naturally by law.

Now the best … Can you recommend your own product/service on the official page? That depends on the law and interpretation as everything else … In practice in best case the internet would be divided in “local” networks - that accepts connections from the same country, state, city or even close community …

You would need to make sure that every of your “virtual friends” would not decide to make a joke and advertise something in the local group or would not be a troll who reports everything as a potential attempt of avoiding law.

That’s said it’s rather proven that after introducing “wild” marketing people are less happy. People require from themselves more. They want to own more just to have it - just because something is popular or it at least the ad is suggesting this.

We should really have a really good international agreements regarding the quality of the ads. We need a clear rules that prevents creating of any weird interpretation. Finally there should be much bigger penalties. Few millions is a huge penalty … for a single worker, but not for a big company. If instead the penalty would require few percent of all money that goes through a company then the risk would be too high for a bigger player.