[echelon]

It ought to be illegal to host ads for registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance).

Especially if you have a marketplace monopoly.

Especially if you used overwhelming force to turn the "URL Bar" into a search product and then bought up 90% market share where you can tax every single brand on the planet.

Google is the most egregious with this with respect to Google Search. It ought to be illegal, frankly.

Google Android is a runner up. Half the time I try to install an app, I get bamboozled into installing an ad placement app (and immediately undo it). Seems like Apple is following in the same footsteps.

Amazon isn't blameless here, either.

So much of our economy is being taxed by gatekeepers that installed themselves into a place that is impossible to dislodge. And the systems they built were not how the web originally worked. They dismantled the user-friendly behavior brick by brick, decade by decade.

Google "Pokemon" -> Ad.

Google "AWS" -> Amazon competitively bidding for their own trademark

Google "Thinkpad" -> Lots of ads.

Google "Anthropic" or "ChatGPT" -> I bet Google is happy to bleed its direct competitors like this.

What the fuck is this, and why did we let it happen?

Companies own these trademarks. Google turned the URL bar into a 100% Google search shakedown.

I'm thinking about a grassroots movement to stop these shenanigans.

[delfinom]

Advertising alternatives to trademarked names is completely legal in every sense. It's known as comparative advertising and is established for more than a century.

You simply cannot pretend to be that trademark product/business and you cannot disparage that trademark.

[specialist]

> You simply cannot pretend to be that trademark product/business

Some fraction of consumers are duped. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many knockoffs.

If I enter Acme Orbital Thrusters into a search engine, the exact match, their actual website, must be the top hit. Otherwise it's a racket, not a search engine.

[Marsymars]

What if Acme Orbital Thrusters is a long-running, covered-up fraudster? Why should they get to automatically outrank sites exposing their crimes?

Or what about when there are multiple trademarks for different goods and services from different companies that are all exact matches for the search terms?

[spolitry]

How much did you pay for that search engine?

[specialist]

You worried Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple will cease to exist if they stop tricking their audience?

[skylurk]

Trademarks differentiate products. App Store is full of shady clones with near identical icons, screenshots and names that differ from the original by a few letters.

[Marsymars]

> It ought to be illegal to host ads for registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance).

This makes me a bit uncomfortable because of how close it comes to infringing on freedom of speech, and how specific a rule it would for search engines (and chat bots) - i.e. there's no real analogy of "can't target trademarked terms" for any ad format other than search engines.

I think my preference would be to simply enforce laws around fraud. If you're a business and you intentionally mislead people, that's fraud, pure and simple. Bring the enforcement hammer down so that companies don't dare make an ad that granny might mistake for not being an ad. Make them err far on the side of making ads look unmistakably like ads for fear of ruinous fines.

[coldtea]

>This makes me a bit uncomfortable because of how close it comes to infringing on freedom of speech,

That's fine, ads should be downright forbidden and get no "freedom of speech".

[Nevermark]

It wouldn't impinge on freedom of speech. Nothing would be prohibited from being said.

It would require conflicts of interest to be disclosed clearly. I.e. labelling speech incentivized by someone else (ad buyer) clearly, as not organic speech (the search engine results).

That is pro-transparency and ethics, not anti-speech.

[Marsymars]

> It would require conflicts of interest to be disclosed clearly. I.e. labelling speech incentivized by someone else (ad buyer) clearly, as not organic speech (the search engine results).

That's specifically what I'm proposing in the post you replied to?

[Nevermark]

Ha! You are correct, that you were correct.

Thanks. I misread a sentence, missed your nuance, and then off to the races.

[echelon]

You're not allowed to use Pikachu commercially. Why should Google? They're taking advantage of every trademark to make money.

Googling a trademark should activate a "no bids" mode.

If Google wants to defend this action, then they should explain why they turned the URL bar into a search product and bought up 90% of the real estate. They've been incredibly heavy handed in search, web, and ads.

[Marsymars]

> You're not allowed to use Pikachu commercially.

There are many uses of "Pikachu" that are reserved for the trademark holder, but by-and-large the point of trademark is to avoid consumer confusion by preventing people from passing off goods/services that aren't from the "Pikachu" holder as actually being from the "Pikachu" trademark holder.

Generally, I am allowed to use "Pikachu" if it's in reference to Pikachu and doesn't involve passing off non-Pikachu things as actually being Pikachu things. If I'm a former employed-by-Nintendo Pikachu illustrator, I'm allowed to advertise that. (Even if I can't provide samples of my work.) I can advertise that I'm the "#1 seller of Pikachu snuggies" as long as I am the #1 seller of non-counterfeit Pikachu snuggies. I can charge people a subscription fee for full access to a website where I review Pikachu (and other pokemon). If I work at Walmart and someone asks me where they can get a Pikachu plush, I'm allowed to direct them to the Digimon plush section, for which I receive a kickback on sales.

The consumer confusion happening when someone googles a trademark and gets ads for different things isn't due to trademark infringement, it's due to misleading ads, which shouldn't be allowed regardless of whether a search term is trademarked or not.

[spolitry]

During a sale aren’t allowed to lie about digimon being pikachu, even if it’s hard to enforce.

[Marsymars]

Yes, of course, you can't lie as a business, but if someone walks into Walmart and searches for "Pikachu?", Walmart employees are free to be trained to use the trademarked term and reply "You don't want Pikachu, consider Digimon!"

(It's a contrived hypothetical, but the closest I could get to a meat-space version of search keywords.)

[eastbound]

Let’s remember it’s not new: Back in 2005, gannies (and 20yo non-nerds too) would install all sorts of viruses by clicking on popups thinking it’s the real thing. I personally switched to Firefox then Mac which didn’t have this problem. It’s like browsing a torrent website without an adblocker: There is absolutely no way to hit the right button, it’s URL changes between mousedown and mouseup.

[Loudergood]

Putting adblock in my moms browser was basically the end of weekly support calls.

[terminalshort]

If I search for a product or service I want to see their competitors too.

[echelon]

You could search for "{trademark} competitors", "{trademark} reviews", "{trademark} vs ...", etc.

For bare trademark searches, we could write laws that allow competitors, but restrict taxing and bidding off the reserved mark above the trademark owner's result.

[terminalshort]

You should be able to explicitly bid on trademarks because you intend to compete directly with that business. Nobody should ever have a legal right to appear at the top of search rankings for anything. Laws restricting business competition are almost never a good thing.

[echelon]

I vehemently disagree.

There used to be plenty of ways to get in touch with the owner of a brand directly. Now they're all being camped by rent extractors.

Google is chief amongst those taxing businesses. They are not government anointed to perform this role. Google should not be allowed to do this.

As a business gets more successful, Google extracts more money from them. Simply trying to access the business will send revenue to Google.

Google took the standard URL bar and turned in into a rent extraction product. This should have been illegal, but our regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel.

Google adds costs to every business, every product, every entrepreneur. They should stick to servicing user inquiries, not stuffing ads in front of simple trademark lookup.

It's time to knock on their doors of regulatory bodies, both in the US and abroad. No more trademark camping from the "URL bar".

[terminalshort]

And every single one of those ways to get in touch still exists. Advertising is, and always has been, optional. But of course those companies that pay for it get more customers. So in practice, almost everyone pays for it. That's not rent extraction. Paying for advertising is paying for attention. And you are in absolutely no circumstance ever entitled to anyone's attention. The only difference with Google is that you even get to appear at all without paying. No other ad supported platform is like that. It's pay up or GTFO. Nobody hijacked your URL bar. You can type in the URL just like you always could.

[Dylan16807]

> And you are in absolutely no circumstance ever entitled to anyone's attention. The only difference with Google is that you even get to appear at all without paying. No other ad supported platform is like that.

If google wants to rebrand to an advertising platform instead of a search engine, I will accept that argument. And I mean truly, fully rebrand, making it clear to everyone that visits.

Until then, their rent extraction is a real problem. They're pretending to return information and putting ads in the way in a deliberately deceptive manner.

Companies wouldn't feel nearly as compelled to bid on their own name if that deception wasn't there.

[echelon]

If I want to get in touch with a company, I go through Google. It's not the brand's choice, it's not my choice. The brand has to pay for that. I, ultimately, also have to pay for that.

This is NOT okay. Google is using monopoly power to do this. They have inserted themselves as parasitic middle men. No different than a cymothoa exigua eating away at the tongue.

This is not advertising. It's a road bump. It's getting throttled by the mafia. It's a protection racket on people's hard-earned brands. A tax on cognition and communication.

Google is a villain here. They are not offering value or service or anything useful. They're extracting.

They're the Harvey Weinstein of the internet here -- nobody wants to do business with the guy, but he's there and he's asking you to do what he wants. You can go along, and do the thing, or you can say no and completely lose your customer.

The customer that already knows you by name. You made it this far. Now there's this gross middle man asking you to give up.

So you let Harvey Weinstein slip his hands in. Cost of doing business.

That's what Google is in this story.

This isn't advertising. It's the R-word, being perpetrated because of a lack of the other R word: healthy market regulation.

90 percent of all humans on the planet are being fleeced by this. Every time you put something into the URL bar, Google gets a piece of the action.

What I'm saying is, when these are brand names, this is theft. Highway robbery. Monopolistic pillaging.

Google needs a slap down.