This is a stub.
This is another example of TANSTAAFL. I have no problem with advertising. In fact, I welcome it. I rely upon it to alert me to new products and new sales. But, I do have a problem with ubiquitous advertising. In the world I want to live in, we each can control how much of our day we are exposed to ads. Ideally, we would get a nickel for each ad we watched. This would naturally limit the ads we were exposed to, as each company has a limited advertising budget. More importantly, the ads we saw would be much more likely to be of interest to us.
Let's consider the issue of time. We each only have so much waking time in our lives. If all of that time is devoted to reading, watching, rejecting, or fast-forwarding through ads, then we have no actual lives. This phenomenon has a parallel with spam email. Since there is no cost to send out emails, the entire system can be overloaded with unwanted emails, spam. However, the spam problem would disappear if it cost a nickel to send each email. And, since many (most?) spam is advertising, that nickel should go to the recipient. This would be a start to addressing the ubiquitous advertising issue.
But there are many more forms of advertising, not just email spam. This is why I used the word "ubiquitous". There is advertising on virtually every website you visit (aren't you glad there is none here on mingovia.org?). Every newspaper and magazine. Every television and radio show. Just about every bus and taxi. In your snail-mail, on billboards and t-shirts and coffee mugs and pens and bumper stickers and tatoos.
So, do you feel overwhelmed with advertising? Would you prefer to be exposed to fewer ads? How many ads do you want to see? How much of your waking time do you want to devote to responding to ads? Once you make that decision, do you want to form a special-interest group and lobby your government to pass a law limiting advertising to just that amount? Do you think that will work? Would such a law have any negative consequences?
Perhaps there is a place to address advertising in the legal system, such as "truth in advertising" laws. However, a technological solution will be much more effective. For television shows, we are already seeing the beginning of solutions. For example, there are two levels of Hulu subscriptions, normal and ad-free. This is a good start, but not exactly what I want. I want to choose the number of ads I see (and how much time they extend that tv show). And, optimally, I would be paid for each ad I watched.
Right now the payment structure is not quite right. Websites are paid for showing you the ad, but you are not paid for seeing it. From the point of view of the company doing the advertising, they would much rather pay the viewers, because each one of them represents a potential customer.
talk about non-time related problems: annoyance, internet ads that don't allow you to exit/close, slow loading webpages due to excessive ads
More to come.