Setting the Wayback Machine to 1995: "Cheap Speech and What It Will Do": What Will Happen to Advertising (Both Commercial and Political)

[This is an excerpt from my 1995 Yale Law Journal article " Cheap Speech and What It Will Do ," written for a symposium called "Emerging Media Technology and the First Amendment.) Thirty years later, I thought I'd serialize the piece here, to see what I may have gotten right—and what I got wrong.]

The new technologies will have at least three significant effects on advertising:

First, it will be easier and cheaper to have advertising-free media. Consumers generally don't like commercials on radio and TV, because (unlike in newspapers) the ads interrupt the program content. Some consumers dislike commercials enough that they would be willing to pay extra for advertising-free media, as they now do for some cable movie channels.

Other consumers would prefer to have free (or cheaper) entert