Template:ConsultCE2014:Keeping pollution by advertising under control

10. Keeping pollution by advertising under control
Advertising financing is a tempting solution for Internet-related activities, because it permits to go around one important difficulty: when one provides something of real but limited value to a great number of people, how can one consolidate this value in order to ensure the sustainability of one's activity? By selling the attention time of people to a unique player "the advertiser" one no longer has to convince one by one the users of contents or services to pay for them or support them. The problem is that the cost one pays for this convenience is very high. It's not just that the contents are polluted by advertising messages, or that users do pay for the advertising through its inclusion in product or service prices. The highest price lies in the fact that the creative or expressive act targets the advertiser and not or not only the virtual audience of those who may appreciate the work. Finally, advertising is a thief of time, it always tries to retain the attention it has captured and it strives at concentrating the attention of many on a limited number of productions and persons.

The matter is not of course to forbid to have recourse to advertising. One must however keep it under control, by authorizing without condition to put in place software for removing advertising from content flows on the user side and by requiring the proper signaling of advertising. Finally, one could consider a specific taxation of advertising, that should target equally all providers of advertising, regardless of their nationality or technology.