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There’s actually a pretty good real world metaphor when you realize that Google is a telecommunications company.

Imagine if when people called your restaurant to make a reservation the phone company had someone else answer the phone first and suggest you try a different restaurant.

No metaphor is perfect but that’s pretty reasonable. Conceptually Google is some kind of an amalgamation of a common carrier and natural regulated monopoly at this point and should be treated as such.

A similar issue with a phone company lead to the first creation of an automatic telephone exchange[1]:

>Strowger, an undertaker, was motivated to invent an automatic telephone exchange after having difficulties with the local telephone operators, one of whom was the wife of a competitor. He was said to be convinced that she, as one of the manual telephone exchange operators, was sending calls "to the undertaker" to her husband.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch

Ever been so pissed at a dude's wife, you invented a major telecom technology that took over the world and lead to better stuff?

Like the Yellow Pages, where your phone listing is immediately adjacent to listings for all your competitors.

I'd argue this use of Google is more like the White Pages, where you look up by name alphabetically.

Yellow Pages would be more like googling "<cuisine> Restaurant in <town>", in which case displaying with all your competitors is much more reasonable.

I think a better real-world example would be paying a third-party for a billboard near a competitor's location.

Nobody's rights are violated by that. There's no conflict of business interests. That's just competition. I think it's the same with running ads against searches for a competitor; Google does not take payment for search placement nor provide unrelated benefits to paid users of its services.

The difference is now one is heavily investing their business in the billboard business to ultimately be placed behind the billboard.

>There's no conflict of business interests.

This is big time a conflict, look no further than the antitrust investigations. Google is known to use their market position (data) to launch businesses in high dollar keyword industries and have their product rise to the top organically and upbid keyword on market incumbents forcing them to pay up or lose position to google products.

To say google doesn’t pay for search placement is a play with words, they take payment for ads that take the shape and form of results and appear above organic results (I’ll call it true #1), organic search results are not paid for...with the exception google sets the rules, and their is heavy buyin/investment from the company’s to obtain #1 organic placement, not to mention the seo rules generally reward and promote use of other google services/buyin.

There's no conflict of business interests. That's just competition. I think it's the same with running ads against searches for a competitor; Google does not take payment for search placement nor provide unrelated benefits to paid users of its services.

This is (now) wrong. Google search-rank ads show up in the search results with only minor indicia that they are ads. This is very different from what Google used to do--keep ads and search results separate with clear visual indications of what content was ads.

Is that actually true? I just searched for [flowers] and [car insurance], two notoriously commercial queries, and the ads were all labeled with "Ad" in a green box, with organic results below the fold.

While you might take issue with all the above-the-fold space being taken up by advertisements and local results, I don't think you can get much clearer than having each advertisement say "Ad". That's a lot more distinction than you get with say TV or print ads.

I totally disagree with the statement "I don't think you can get much clearer than having each advertisement say "Ad"." If you want much clearer, just look at Google circa around 15 years ago, where ads had a much greater visual distinction with a blue background color, or in the right gutter.

And, of course, Google knows this. The past 10-15 years has seen a sea change where ads look more and more like natural search results, and as they've taken up more and more real estate. It used to be you could compete with having good SEO positioning, but now SEO positioning is almost irrelevant for any commercial terms (except for how it affects your AdWords bidding positioning), as basically everything above the fold is just ads now.

The design pushing organic search results down does seem like a conflict of interest between showing the user the best possible search results and showing the user advertisements.

On a 1200px tall desktop screen with adblocking turned off, I see four ads that look like search results with a small "Ad" marker next to them, then a map. One map search result is visible on the first screen. When I scroll, there are three map search results, then three organic web search results. These are followed by four suggested queries, three more organic web search results, then four news stories before I get to the rest of the results.

I'm not sure I'd call this evil, but Google used to be explicitly anti-evil and this is very much not that.

Lol I just tried, literally every single clickable result (well ok 98% the bottom map listing that is only partially showing) is paid. The right side bar boxes are hard to tell they are an ad, and I would bet $1000 that 90% (or more) of users wont even know the top results with green ad notation is not an organic result. search screenshot: https://imgur.com/Qhw2tgY

Interesting. Brave blocks the RHS ads.

I wasn't aware of that (I always use adblockers). I don't like that at all, and after reading it I'm now expecting Google products to try to trick me into doing things that are profitable for Google, which Google knows were not my intent.

And? Yellow Pages did the same thing. Every ad was next to dozens of competitors.

In no way did the yellow pages create a dynamic bidding war with competitors for ads next to your listing when people went to find your number.

What is the lease in this example? I don't think "optimizing your website for SEO" or "using other Google products" is anywhere close to the kind of specific relationship a lease implies.

You may have missed this:

>There is no great real world example, but imagine...

Well for each one of Google’s services there are legal agreements between them and the business.

Landlords and google may not be exact but in both instances businesses are dependent, and business don’t just pay google/landlords, business improve and bring value to both google/property. In the case of property a restaurant may do a $1M buildout and the landlord will benefit later if he can release to another restaurant who can reuse the buildout. Or maybe your Walmart and an anchor store bringing customer making the rest of the locations more valuable for the landlord. Google benefits through better products: search results, maps, business info (hours, phone, etc...). The signage seems apt, as a business if I invest in the google ecosystem and make their products better it’s at the very least bizarre they would benefit by selling ads for my business name to my competitors. Basically it’s saying as business succeed on google, google is going to make more money advertising your value to competitors.