The FCC under Ronald Reagan increased the limits on commercial advertising on television from 8 minutes to 16 minutes per hour. A later restriction was added to limit ads to 10 minutes per hour during children's programming.
This petition seeks a return to limits closer to the 1970s era of television programming.
Currently, re-broadcasts of per-1980s programs are edited by removing up to 8 minutes of the original program in order to fit 16 minutes of ads into each broadcast hour. The shows many of us enjoyed in our youth have been butchered in the name of profit and at the expense of aesthetics and art.
Furthermore, too much advertising is an audio-visual assault on the viewer. While it can be argued that some ads are entertaining, the majority of ads by far are simply annoying.