Comment by eli
18 hours ago
Ironically this is a bad thing for Google from a legal standpoint. If a term becomes "genericized" then it can lose trademark protection.
"Aspirin" is a famous example. It used to be a brand name for acetylsalicylic acid medication, but became such a common way to refer to it that in the US any company can now use it.
Apparently the "lost in the Treaty of Versailles" explanation is a bit of a just-so story: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/55729/why-did-ba...