> The internet could be "fixed" by regulating advertising.
Regulation always requires coordination, which is simply not possible at internet scale. Facebook and Twitter can't even regulate the content on their own platforms, and you're talking about regulation at an even larger scale against strong interests with large financial reserves.
What's needed is a secure/private by default browser sandbox so these interests have no say in how their content is consumed. Take a look the extremes Gemini has gone to ensure privacy [1]. Some of those can be relaxed without compromising privacy much, but a serious effort along those lines is what's actually needed.
We are somehow able to regulate consumer goods (health and safety standards for example), which also is a global operation involving hundreds of thousands of actors.
> We are somehow able to regulate consumer goods (health and safety standards for example), which also is a global operation involving hundreds of thousands of actors.
Because you can enforce it at the point of sale, ie. selling X happens in a limited geographical region which can be enforced.
The "point of sale" equivalent on the internet is the browser, which is exactly where I said the privacy properties need to be enforced.
Finally, it's frankly absurd to want inefficient and expensive legal controls when cheap and automatic technological controls are perfectly feasible. Why involve the various governments at all?
>Facebook and Twitter can't even regulate the content on their own platforms,
How are we supposed to know this given that they don't have an actual incentive to do so? Look at the allegedly "unworkable" enforcement of hate-speech legislation in say, Germany. What did Facebook do when they were faced with 4% global revenue fines? Hire some moderators and it appears to work reasonbaly well.
Same goes for advertising. Get out the hammer and I bet it wouldn't take long until those companies suddenly discover how creative they can be in cleaning their act up.
> What did Facebook do when they were faced with 4% global revenue fines? Hire some moderators and it appears to work reasonbaly well. Same goes for advertising.
No it doesn't. Facebook is a highly visibile, monolithic entity. If you only have a few bad actors legislation works fine. This isn't the case here.
If you want a more apt analogy, the fight against privacy violations in advertising is much closer to the fight against piracy: it will never go away, no matter how many legal restrictions you put in place, unless there's a technological solution that prevents it from the get-go. There probably isn't for piracy, but there is for privacy.
Regulation always requires coordination, which is simply not possible at internet scale. Facebook and Twitter can't even regulate the content on their own platforms, and you're talking about regulation at an even larger scale against strong interests with large financial reserves.
What's needed is a secure/private by default browser sandbox so these interests have no say in how their content is consumed. Take a look the extremes Gemini has gone to ensure privacy [1]. Some of those can be relaxed without compromising privacy much, but a serious effort along those lines is what's actually needed.
[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/