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I'd be quite alright with banning (or at least heavily regulating) illuminated billboards. Those are indeed very distracting, and the light pollution concern is valid.

Billboards in general, though? I live in a place with lots of billboards and they're pretty easy to ignore. I don't really see the upside here to what would constitute a freedom of speech/expression infringement.

I think the more reasonable emphasis should be on regulating the light escaping from a property, not micromanaging the property itself. Limit the lumens or whatever in various protected directions (into the sky, onto roadways, etc.) and that would address the entirety of the actually-valid concerns.



> they're pretty easy to ignore

I’m not doubting your experience but that reminds me of when people say they browse the web without adblockers. Could it just be desensitization?


Online ads are hard to ignore specifically because they use system resources to display - especially when they're JavaScript-heavy, but even without JS they still often entail image downloads and such that do add up. Billboards ain't really analogous; obnoxious lighting notwithstanding, they're no more obtrusive than a building or a tree or a sculpture or anything else that might exist on some plot of land - and while I'd personally prefer to see a building or tree or sculpture, I don't feel strongly enough about there being a billboard instead to desire outright criminalization (read: use of violence by the state in response) of billboards entirely.




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