The Ethics of Phone Books

I noticed an article on S.F. Gate online about an initiative by the City of San Francisco to ban the delivery of hard-copy yellow pages phone books within the City limits. It’s a follow-up to their move to ban plastic shopping bags a few years ago, and appears to be based on the fact that most people these days use electronic yellow pages online instead of the physical version, the fact that unused physical phone books waste a lot of energy, the fact that un-recycled versions take up a lot of landfill space, and the fact that no one on the San Francisco City Council appears to have any ownership interest in a company that prints yellow pages. Naturally, the people who publish yellow pages are protesting this measure on First Amendment grounds, saying that such a ban interferes with their rights to freedom of the press – which brings up a number of interesting ethics questions…

First off, does advertising classify as protected speech? I’ll leave the second-guessing of what the Founding Fathers would have intended to the Strict Constructionist types on the far right, although it’s hard to imagine that anyone living in 1787 could have imagined telephones, let alone telemarketers or spam emails. But whether the Founders intended it or not, the real question for us is whether advertising SHOULD be protected under the Constitution. The right to advertise isn’t guaranteed under the First Amendment, but the right to publish is – and in a very real sense, most print media exists only to sell ads; the content is just a way of getting people to pick up the material and read it. If the city is allowed to ban distribution of yellow pages, there’s no reason the same law couldn’t be used to restrict distribution of newspapers and magazines…

On the other hand, the city does have the right to regulate what gets collected by its garbage trucks, what gets disposed of in its landfills, and what gets processed in its recycling plants. Even if San Francisco can’t prevent the books from being distributed, it can probably make it a crime to throw them away – or make it a requirement for the publisher to collect the old ones. Neither of these actions will endear the City Council to the people of San Francisco, nor will it go over well if the publishers start charging more to advertise in the yellow pages in order to cover the cost of collection and recycling. But while we could argue that people have a right to smaller landfills – and more environmentally friendly living conditions in general – it would be harder to argue that people have a right to physical yellow pages…

Unless we consider that some people do not have Internet connections, can’t afford to have computers, and might still need to find telephone numbers. In which case, the lack of telephone books would inconvenience those people and cut off anyone advertising in the books from a huge (if admittedly not very lucrative) market segment. So I think we have to ask a few questions about this situation: Does the right of the city to exclude tons of waste from the landfill and even more tons of particulate from the air supersede the right of published to publish phone books, or companies to advertise in them? Does the right of people who can’t afford a computer to look things up supersede the right of everyone else to a cleaner city environment? Should the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech apply to all advertising? And if not, how do we draw the line between publications that sell advertising space around their content, and publications that squeeze content in between masses of copy?

And, perhaps more important of all, should a single municipal government be able to make that decision unilaterally, without input from the Supreme Court, Congress, the People of the United States, or even the residents of the city they nominally govern?

It’s worth thinking about…