"Commercial speech" being protected by free speech laws anywhere is abhorrent. The advertising industry, in and of itself, seems abhorrent to me. It's one of the worst things humans have come up with, ever.

True, you can't separate ads vs sponsored content quite easily.

but you can help this by banning all forms of active tracking.

Static ads only, no click tracking, and complete ban on profiling clients and especially on adjusting prices based on client/possible client behavior patterns.

Free speech is a thing in the EU too.

To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in technical legal disputes and still hasn't happened, despite the 2009 Lisbon Treaty mandating it.

The US First Amendment has no exceptions as worded, but the US Supreme Court has read some into it. The Convention has exceptions listed in the text, although they are vaguely defined – but like the US, the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive case law on the scope of those exceptions.

The big difference in practice is the US exceptions end up being significantly more narrow than those in Europe. However, given in both, the details of the exceptions are in case law – courts can and do change their mind, so this difference could potentially change (either by narrowing or broadening) in the decades to come.

It would be worth a try to outlaw compensation for advertising. The spirit of free speech is usually that you aren’t being paid for it.

Outside of US free speech isn't the carte blanche it is stateside. There are guardrails, there are limitations pretty much everywhere else. Even in the US This militant application is fairly recent, post 1980s.

You don't need to ban advertising, you just need to ban paying for advertising. That doesn't harm free speech. When there's no money to be made the problem will sort itself out.

I'm not following the relationship - because you'd have to pay, thus it's not "free" speech? It's hard to argue that having to pay a minimal fee (of let's say $1 per month) would be something against free speech. But the payment shall remain anonymous obviously.

What are you on about? Who’s speech? The speech of a massive multinational corporation? No thanks. I want the freedom to browse without getting pointless products shoved down my throat.

I'd say the first amendment is due for an overhaul anyway for a variety of reasons. (Heck, the whole constitution is.)

>How will you ban that without infringing on free speech

You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity.