Comment by echelon
1 day ago
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.
> 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.
>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".
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.
> 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?
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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.
> 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.
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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.
Putting adblock in my moms browser was basically the end of weekly support calls.
If I search for a product or service I want to see their competitors too.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
How much did you pay for that search engine?
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