The product is the same as the speech, whereas in advertising the speech is in sycophantic service of another product.
We can have word of mouth, genuine, in forums and social media.
We can have reviews, genuine, in websites.
We can have websites which present new products and business, not as paid sponsorships.
We can search on our own initiative and go to their website.
We can have online catalogs.
And tons of other ways.
Many don't think businesses should exist in the first place.
That won't convince anyone.
If you remove the ability for these people to advertise there goes their livelihood. I understand the desire to want to punish big evil corporations but all this will do is strengthen them because they're the ones who have enough capital to survive something like this and scoop up the marketshare left behind by the millions of small businesses that will fail when this is implemented.
but you can help this by banning all forms of active tracking.
Static ads only, no click tracking, and complete ban on profiling clients and especially on adjusting prices based on client/possible client behavior patterns.
Websites can too.
If you know the kind of articles your readers like, you can find ads that your readers will like.
Pervasive surveillance to make a system that's practically worse than the alternative that doesn't require mass surveillance, and is much simpler and cheaper. Did I say amusing before? Depressing is probably a better fit.
To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in technical legal disputes and still hasn't happened, despite the 2009 Lisbon Treaty mandating it.
The US First Amendment has no exceptions as worded, but the US Supreme Court has read some into it. The Convention has exceptions listed in the text, although they are vaguely defined – but like the US, the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive case law on the scope of those exceptions.
The big difference in practice is the US exceptions end up being significantly more narrow than those in Europe. However, given in both, the details of the exceptions are in case law – courts can and do change their mind, so this difference could potentially change (either by narrowing or broadening) in the decades to come.
> "Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
In the 2015 case Perinçek v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights applied Article 10 to find against a Swiss law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Can you imagine a Soviet court ever striking down a genocide denial law?
The decision is controversial because it introduces a double standard into the Court's case law – it had previously upheld laws criminalising Holocaust denial, now it sought to distinguish the Holocaust from the Armenian genocide in a way many find arbitrary and distasteful – the consistent thing would be to either allow denying both or disallow denying both.
But still, it just shows how mistaken your Soviet comparison is.
You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity.
The FCC regulates airwaves (and thus broadcast stations/networks), because the broadcast spectrum is a shared resource with bandwidth limits. The FCC similarly regulates cable television systems. The FCC does not regulate cable-only television networks.
Conflating advertising with free speech is like conflating sex work with reproductive rights.
The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market power over the distribution channel so that you're paying them a premium over competing distributors. But then wouldn't the best way to prevent them from extracting that premium to be to make it so nobody has exclusive control over distribution channels, e.g. by breaking up concentrated markets or requiring federated protocols?
That's a different model than paying a technical writer to do technical writing.
Yes. You self host it as a company, and it can only be reproduced (if they wish) in outlets (say review sites) when there's no payment or compensation of any kind involved for that.
If what you put up on that billboard is an ad, then it's advertising and would be covered. If not, it wouldn't. So you could rent a spot on the website, but you couldn't put promotions on it.
This would be distinct from ordinary web hosting because you're not just renting a space on a site, you're also renting exposure (a spot on some other website).
Sure, you could probably find edge cases - "what if I put a table of contents on my page with every page URL on every site on my web host on it" - but the distinction would be clear most of the time.
At the core of the first amendment is the idea that people should not be punished for criticizing their government. I think that idea is worth preserving. But the idea that people are free to say anything they choose, in any context, regardless of its factual status, and also that their permission to do so is limited only by the resources they can muster to promulgate their speech, is an unwarranted extension of that concept.
