Practically speaking, 99% of advertising is covered by a dozen or two primary channels which are obnoxious and ubiquitous. The goal should be to regulate platform-ads, e.g. print, billboards, TV, radio, web, streaming, social media. Ads are all already clearly regulated within the limits of freedom of speech, such as criminalizing false advertising, as another comment has pointed out. These platforms are also generally regulated for obscenity, harassment, etc., which if anything are much more subjective than commercial activity.

> What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right?

That is (or should be) prevented by laws against disturbing the peace or similar. Which is more along the lines of reasonable solutions in general. Banning advertising wholesale seems impossible, yes, but regulating the actual most common mechanisms of selling ad spots is much easier.

> Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that.

You're paying somebody for the distribution of the ad embedded within/alongside content (websites) you don't own.

> How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line?

Posting on Facebook is clearly distinct from paying Facebook to promote your ads.

I haven't thought hard about this, but I think the solution relies on some definition of a 'platform' or a similar idea. I think most people could see a difference between the carsigns and the websongs, where the latter look like ads because they're on someone else's platform.

I think we can narrow down on weird cases in between the carsigns and the websongs. Maybe the line gets muddier if the employees aren't driving their own cars with signs, or if those employees are hired to do nothing but drive, or if they're not even employees and they're Uber drivers but for driving signs... To me, that last one sounds like a platform which exists for nothing but advertising.

> this idea of making advertising illegal is just a non-starter. It goes against the basic tenants of freedom of speech.

FWIW, that’s not entirely accurate. The tenets of free speech include a long list of exceptions. In the US, commercial speech and specifically advertisements do not necessarily have free speech protections, by design, especially when it comes to false advertising, misleading advertising, and anything else ads might have that is on the list of exceptions including IP, defamation, and false statements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...