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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

    this site lets companies advertise
    against us using our brand

Well, to be fair the "site" lets anybody advertise for any search term.

Would it be better if some companies would be entitled to exlusively advertise for certain terms?

I don't think so.

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Google knows what they're doing. Being a private enterprise, they can block you from "buying" the competence name (TM) to put your own product.

Just try to buy "Google" term to advertise your business (let's say you are Dropbox and want to buy "Google" and "Drive")... Yeah, they had it blocked. But you can buy "one drive", which is unfair albeit legal. It's not as the terms in dispute were "project", "management", "time", "team". It's the brand name, which incidentally in the case of Basecamp has zero relation with what they're selling.

If Google wanted a fair play they would come with something akin to the Trade Mark laws built in house.

"If Google wanted a fair play they would come with something akin to the Trade Mark laws built in house."

Said by someone who has no idea about trademarks. Trademark. For what class? For what country?

Most trademarks have only a few classes. So you may be allowed to sell stuff because trademark XYZ only covers shoes. You can't sell computers with "Apple" brand but nobody can forbid you to sell apple (to eat). Who owns a brand? Budweiser beer is owned by Budweiser USA but they don't have the trademark in most European countries. This would get extraordinary complex very quickly.

nobody would have problems with this kind of ads if they ware not made to look like normal results.

People use adblockers with impunity with zero care how an ad looks, they just don't want to see ads.

I have zero problem seeing advertisements. I use an ad blocker because I have a problem with advertisements that follow my every move online.

"nobody" -> companies refusing to play into the big ads-roulette.

as for users, if ads never got so annoying adblockers would not be so common. (I literally started using one because some sites were impossible to use, as in every link redirect to a new ads page and nothing else)

> if ads never got so annoying

but then if your ad is slightly more annoying, it grabs slightly more attention, and thus convert slightly better than your competitor's ad. Thus, leading to today's world - it's inevitable in advertising, due to game theory.

The only way to win is to not play. Change the game.

I think the devils-advocate argument is that Google is essentially a de-facto DNS for much of the world, and is using (abusing?) this position to place ads, distractions, and/or misdirection in between searchers and their destinations.

Like registered trademarks?

Kind of. But the standard of trademark violation is not "did a competitor use it". The standard for violation is closer to: "was the trademark used in a way that might confuse customers over which products or services are authorized/provided by you".

I'm not a lawyer so obviously this is not legal advice.

In different jurisdictions the standard for a trademark violation is vastly different. In some European countries you can't name a competitor in an ad (so no Coke vs Pepsi ads). So this case seems to be well within the range of what trademark law could do. Simply make it illegal to run ads on keywords that are competitors trademarks. Totally not a lawyer though.

Do you remember this from about a decade ago?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Louis_Vuitton

The thinking in the ECJ ruling seemed to completely exclude the burden on the consumer that comes from having to sift through patently unethical listings to get the one you want. (Some people call "patently unethical" dealings "sharp" dealings or whatever supposedly complementary term but let's admit that those practices take advantage of unschooled consumers, and are only good if you think that the only worthy consumer is one who is already schooled)

It may be "fun" to discover prices through haggling or learn through research that BogusHandbags.example.com[1] isn't a legitimate dealer in Louis Vuitton handbags but it is work and it doesn't scale to have every consumer have to do it for every decision.

[1] using example.com purely as an example. The operators of example.com are doing a good thing for the internet.

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