This is the strongest antitrust case against Google in my opinion. They are the monopoly search engine. Tons of people google a website name instead of typing in the URL. Tons of people don't know the ads are actually ads and Google is making it harder to tell them apart from the every year[0]. It's basically like the mafia telling you to fork over money or else they put up your competitors' billboards in front of your store. Not a very scary mafia, but still.
They may not be able to call themselves by the competitor's name, but what about the "alternative to <company>" that we see a lot.
Furthermore, Google will "dynamically" assemble an advert based on the current search to 'optimise' click-though (and they recently sent a mail out making it clear this will be the only type of text ad going forward)
They think they're optimising "click through" rate.
But what they're really doing is using heuristics to find the advert that's most likely to be confused with the top search result.
Did anything change there? I remember Basecamp’s Jason Fried complaining about it[0] but I wasn’t aware of any policy changes that prevent someone from bidding on their competitor’s names and essentially placing their brand ahead of yours when searching for your brand name…
as luck would have it, my mum (nearly 70, but pretty good with technology) just fell for something like that. She wanted to book a Ryanair flight so googled for Ryanair. First result is an ad for some kind of a scummy reseller called esky. She ended up paying way more for the flight plus some extra unwanted stuff like insurance and online check-in… urgh.
... Until a competitor starts advertising against the the term "eBay".
At which point, online advertising becomes protection money.