Gave me a chuckle. Left hand - Right Hand.
I wish the FTC would prohibit buying ads for brand names.
Putting up a "Nintendo Switch" ad on the "Steam Deck" search term, and vice versa, is wrong. Even more so when big companies camp on the trademarks of smaller startups.
I'm angry because this has happened to me.
Even then, what counts as an ad that competes with Microsoft? Can ubuntu advertise their Windows alternative? Can an authorized reseller advertise themselves as the best place to buy a copy?
This problem sounds almost impossible to me, and the cure almost sounds worse than the disease.
But I think it would be crazy to prohibit competitive advertising in the first place.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-vs-apples-trademark-battle...
The Wired article makes it seem like Apple is going after someone here, but they’re ‘just’ filing for a trademark.
Whether you agree or disagree with the tactics, what they’re doing isn’t what you claim they’re doing.
Apple is not suing anyone; it has asked for a re-ruling from the Swiss trademark authorities. As far as I have been able to see, this is based on the ownership of the Apple Corps trademark, and the Swiss fruit association is making unnecessary noise that has been amplified by the credulous because anything about Apple (Designed in California) makes for more clicks.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2018/11/...
Please correct me if I misinterpreted the findings though.
Yes, this kind of advertising is a stupid zero-sum game, but our society in general, and free markets in particular have a lot of stupid zero-sum games. I see no reason why this one should be illegal.
And when I search for Google Pixel, I get a banner with 7 pictures and a shopping link and another link to buy a Pixel.
Of course, by default I have an Ad blocker on iOS and I don’t see any ads
People keep wanting law to work like math, and it just doesn’t. Context matters.
It's PURE google protection racket money paid by jkl corp so it gets the traffic of people who want to visit jkl corp.
Mafia as business model is one of the many evils that google does and is.
Why do you think google moved the ads from the side where they were clearly marked and obviously not search results to the top of the search results and made it much harder to tell "this link is actually an ad"? I mean obviously for money but why do you think it made them money? What do you think of google's plans to offer deep discounts to advertisers for traffic from keyword searches for their brand or corporate identity? Reasonable?
I don't believe that and i'm not sure how anyone does tbh.
You want your traffic? Pay /us/ for the privilege.
Congratulations on discovering how advertising works.
Did the phone company put your calls through to your competitor if you paid them to do that or would they be in big trouble for doing so. It's not "advertising" it's getting between you and your customers and tolling the infrastructure to the highest bidder.
The phone company was regulated very heavily as a utility just like google isn't.
Perhaps this is the answer for how to treat google? Regulate them heavily and ensure they show the same thing to everyone?
Interesting suggestion you're making.
Please provide some evidence of Google systematically violating its policy here https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6020955?hl=en
Google have deliberately made ads much harder to distinguish from results. They have done so for money and it has been successful. No policy of theirs changes this, excuses this nor makes it go away nor makes it less relevant. I care as much about google's "policy" on google's clear misbehaviour as I do about mafia citing their "code" in a criminal trial. You should try assuming people lie for money when there are no consequences until shown to be otherwise.
Try all the standard, accepted and common google ad techniques on yellow pages ads and see how far you get. I'm betting on that being nowhere and usually because it is illegal.
What can or can’t be done in yellow pages is irrelevant. I also can’t click on things in yellow pages, does that mean presenting links should be illegal?
What they want is for the majority of punters using google to search for the url for xyz corp to click the ad for that url rather than that same url the search result. This is why they changed the ads to look like search result and put them above. It's incredibly lucrative. It's exactly what MBA types talk about monetisation of the infrastructure to "toll the way." And the rest of us refer to as "protection money." That was and remains the claim. It's pretty solid.
But good on you for sticking up for google so hard, it's unfashionable to take the side of the gazillion dollar behmoth with all the market power and it needs to be respected that you're trying.
If G bought Bing or DuckDuckGo or any of the alternative search engines that appear as choices in people’s browsers, and not just that but did so under a threat of violence, you’d be right to call it a mafia. If it threatened to kneecap Apple executives to be the default search engine on their devices instead of paying Apple billions yearly for the privilege you’d be right to call it a mafia. Otherwise they don’t extort anyone any more than any property owner asking to be paid for use of their property.
There’s a lot of shady shit that Google does, but it’s childish and silly to expect a trillion plus company to be some embodiment of a non-capitalist utopia embedded in a capitalist society, and call them mafia if they fall short of that ideal.
I might be shilling for Google, but your great hope is the government? Haven’t those people been known to employ deadly force at home and overseas in all kinds of disgusting ways?
Despite my best efforts I can’t follow your overstretched analogy. How does Google redirect anything by putting ads on top of search results?
Granted, it's partly my fault for letting a loved one be that computer un-savvy, but that kind of ad should have been detected and blocked before it was ever served.
They do. Your own brand name has a higher Quality Score against your own ads thus lower CPC.
What's the endgame? Companies can only reduce ad expenses if they have monopolies or agreements among themselves.
Especially for products -- Worst case is when I looked earlier there is STILL MALWARE on Bing for searches like "google chrome".