Boy am I glad I had my coffee. IANAL and am not used to reading through things like this.
It seems like nnu-16121 has it correct.

It seems that the city could do something like this if they did it in a different way. These things are always more complicated than it seems.

The first part of the decision has to do with determing what kind of speech it is. But is was this part at the very end that seemed to be the most relevant:

Such a regulation “is valid only if it is the least restrictive means available to further a compelling government interest.”
the City advanced three governmental interests: (1) waste reduction, (2) resident privacy, and (3) cost recovery.We need not determine whether any or all of these interests are “compelling”; even if they are, the Ordinance is not the least restrictive means available to further them. One clear alternative is for the City to support the Yellow Pages Companies’ own private opt-out programs. With proper implementation, the private opt-out programs could achieve precisely the same goals as the City’s registry. Even fining the Yellow Pages Companies for a lack of compliance with their own opt-out terms would be less restrictive than compelling them to fund and advertise the City’s program.

4. We do not hold that implementation of any of these alternatives would necessarily be lawful. They simply demonstrate that the regulations imposed by the Ordinance were not the least restrictive means.

There’s no evidence of that. It’s laughable to call somebody dumping a book full of for-profit advertisements “speech”. If this was a political group passing out fliers with ideas etc. you may have a stronger argument. This is garbage, and its being put on our property.

The term “corporate” in “corporate personhood” applies to a lot more than just for-profit incorporated businesses: it means towns, cities, counties, churches, partnerships, non-profit organizations, Boing Boing itself (part of Happy Mutant LLC), unions, colleges, trusts, and other entities.

The town insisted that they use the towns opt-out system, that they paid for the town’s opt out system which duplicated their own, and the town exempted publishers of some phone books that had a different ratio of advertisers to “content”

The court opinion said that insisting publishers had an opt out and fining them for errors (delivery in spite of opt out) would have been just fine. The drawing the line “well, their content is good enough, but your content is not” is where the 1st amendment question comes in.

The court never said “you can’t ban the distribution of these books”, because the city never had a blanket ban. The court said “you can’t pick and choose who gets a ban based upon the content of their publication”.

DEX MEDIA WEST, INC. v. CITY OF SEATTLE696 F.3d 952 (2012)United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Read it. It is for some reason much more informed about actual content of the court opinion than any of the commentary I’ve read elsewhere.

What I saw most during my stint was that smaller business owners were often borderline internet-illiterate, and so they still saw the phone book advertisements as being of value. When my company started to bundle customizable webpages or PPC/SEO products into their print package — at no additional cost during the early days, mind — loads of advertisers flipped their wigs. They didn’t understand the internet, they did not want it in their lives, and oftentimes they actually wanted to opt out of digital-anything altogether. (In a weird spate of irony, I guess?) Some got it, of course, but for the most part you’re looking at places who were still sure in their hearts that phonebooks were relevant to the below-75 crowd. So the phonebooks are ultimately shrinking, but at way less a rate than I would have anticipated.

As for consumer opt-out, well. I think that’s entirely dependent on the individual company. The place I was at had an online form — somewhat buried on the site, but that was more because the site was five years out of date than anything — and if you were willing to do a little legwork, you could send an e-mail or call customer service. The request would get shunted to a distribution department, and life went on. *That* said, Jesus Horatio Christ: there are a lot of shitty phonebook companies out there, so by no means would I expect most places to bother with the ‘courtesy’.