If pubs want to fix it, they certainly should go ahead and fix it. Seems a weird way to run a business to me. But it makes no difference to large brand advertisers. Also I suspect any “fix” would be imperfect and simply be a ploy to raise prices, which, no. I’m not especially for.

I don’t consider any of this fraud, btw, any more than I considered it fraud when I bought yellow pages ads and I’d walk around town seeing piles of yellow pages sitting outside apartment buildings, and I knew they’d never be seen. I buy TV ads that air in the middle of the night on stations no one watches. I buy magazine ads that are printed and left lying around in 10,000 hotel rooms no one looks at.

Finally, I’ve recently read virtually every economic study of advertising back to the 18th century. There is *zero* theory about how any of this is a “burden on taxpayers.” It creates no physical waste or pollution, taxes are still collected, and there is no federal money being spent in this equation.