alt Hacker NewsIt ought to be illegal to host ads for registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance).
Especially if you have a marketplace monopoly.
Especially if you used overwhelming force to turn the "URL Bar" into a search product and then bought up 90% market share where you can tax every single brand on the planet.
Google is the most egregious with this with respect to Google Search. It ought to be illegal, frankly.
Google Android is a runner up. Half the time I try to install an app, I get bamboozled into installing an ad placement app (and immediately undo it). Seems like Apple is following in the same footsteps.
Amazon isn't blameless here, either.
So much of our economy is being taxed by gatekeepers that installed themselves into a place that is impossible to dislodge. And the systems they built were not how the web originally worked. They dismantled the user-friendly behavior brick by brick, decade by decade.
Google "Pokemon" -> Ad.
Google "AWS" -> Amazon competitively bidding for their own trademark
Google "Thinkpad" -> Lots of ads.
Google "Anthropic" or "ChatGPT" -> I bet Google is happy to bleed its direct competitors like this.
What the fuck is this, and why did we let it happen?
Companies own these trademarks. Google turned the URL bar into a 100% Google search shakedown.
I'm thinking about a grassroots movement to stop these shenanigans.
Replies
Advertising alternatives to trademarked names is completely legal in every sense. It's known as comparative advertising and is established for more than a century.
You simply cannot pretend to be that trademark product/business and you cannot disparage that trademark.
> It ought to be illegal to host ads for registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance).
This makes me a bit uncomfortable because of how close it comes to infringing on freedom of speech, and how specific a rule it would for search engines (and chat bots) - i.e. there's no real analogy of "can't target trademarked terms" for any ad format other than search engines.
I think my preference would be to simply enforce laws around fraud. If you're a business and you intentionally mislead people, that's fraud, pure and simple. Bring the enforcement hammer down so that companies don't dare make an ad that granny might mistake for not being an ad. Make them err far on the side of making ads look unmistakably like ads for fear of ruinous fines.
If I search for a product or service I want to see their competitors too.