What If We Made Advertising Illegal? (opens in new tab)

Rather than wholesale banning of advertisements I would like to see existing laws actually enforced and judges using existing wiggle-room to make examples of businesses that use deceptive advertising, false advertising, multiple shell companies to hide bad reputation highly prevalent on Amazon for Chinese resellers, knowingly selling defective products or used refurb products as new, making it highly difficult or near impossible to return items or contact a real person at the company and so on. Those shady companies should feel enough pain they just leave the scene all together. The same goes for countries that harbor shady businesses. After enough complaints are confirmed they must be isolated entirely from global trade long enough to make them feel real pain.

As much as I dislike advertising, I'd be very opposed to a ban on it. That would be too heavy of an infringement on free speech, and would eliminate the legitimately good things that advertising can do. And that's not even beginning to address the trickier-than-it-seems question of "what counts as advertising".

I'd prefer to see specific abusive practices banned rather than a blanket ban of advertising itself.