I pay five figures a month for my "$domain" ad. It's not cheap by any means, but we're forced to buy, otherwise our competitors steal our traffic.
If customers searching for your brand are happy to buy from your competitor with a different name, maybe your brand isn't so strong?
And if you are profiting from advertising your brand to people who don't choose your product over alternatives, isn't your marketing just "stealing" purchases from competitors?
User: "Google, how do I get to Costco?"
Google: "Here are directions to Target."
User:"But I asked for directions to Costco."
Google: "Target gave us a lot of money. So, firstly here are directions to Target. If you still want Costco, keep scrolling, but Target is great. You should shop here."
When you literally search for one brand and the first result is a competitor, just because they bought out the ad space for your brand name's keywords, that is theft, imo. Or extortion if you'd prefer. It's at the very least, extremely disingenuous and sleazy. Customer loyalty is looking up the preferred brand to begin with.
You'll probably figure out at some point that they do, and that this whole law thing is a proxy for ethics we put in place so that we can punish people that don't.
Until then, live in your world.
Why do I owe you a fulfilled promise? Because I said I'd be honest? Why do I owe you honesty about my honesty?
Reductio ad absurdum
If I build a search engine and promise that it will give accurate and honest results to your search queries, and then it doesn't do that... why do I owe you? "I didn't force you to trust me" is the most childish way to try and weasel out of broken promises there is.
To answer your question though - they don't, but it makes them a shitty company to lie to/manipulate their users.
The only real solution is to regulate this to make competition fairer again.
Two stores, A and B are competitors. I visit company A and say that I'll stand at the entrance of their competitor, store B. I'll tell each customer trying to enter store B about store A and attempt to refer them, as long as store A pays me $0.50 for each person I try to send their way.
This works, some people that drove to visit store B now go to store A instead. Now, store B is getting annoyed at me "stealing" their customers, but I have a solution. I tell store B the more money they pay me, the less likely it is that I'll refer their next customer to store A. So, store B starts paying me $1.00 each time someone tries to enter their own store, and in return, I do nothing but stand there.
A year goes by and I'm standing at the entrance of every store in the country. I collect a dollar when someone tries to enter every store, and I do nothing but let them pass.
We've even seen this happen with repeat customers of ours. It's tough since Google allows the ads to be very confusing, but then we also have competitors who have blatantly copied our style, content, and have even named themselves in a similar manner.
We also spend just under five figures a month on branded keywords to combat this. We rank #1 organically for all of them, but there are always 3-4 competitors bidding on them so we only get a small portion of that traffic if we don't pay for those keywords and get the #1 paid spot as well.
Even with that in place people will still get duped and click ad #2, #3, or #4 that go to competitor sites.