Why is that a shakedown? Shouldn't competitors be able to advertise their products? Any users who are actually looking for Williams Sonoma will find it. Any who are open to having their minds changed, or are interested in competing products, will be interested in competitors ads.

should your competitors be able to buy 100% of the screen space on mobile with images where your organic result has none? 50% sure maybe but literally google doesn't even put the organic results above the fold on mobile. Often on google on mobile the organic results are 2 screens down.

Branded keywords are not always allowed, and restrictions on those ads are pretty strict.

Yeah, I think the only on-brand search ads that should be allowed are ones for totally unrelated products OR those ads are placed below what on-brand search results would provide. Google has no incentive to fix this though because it's an extra tax they charge the entire online advertising space (+ all the other search providers do it). Carefully crafted legislation could put an end to this tax.

> Yeah, I think the only on-brand search ads that should be allowed are ones for totally unrelated products...

The problem is that this is subjective and would need to be automated somehow. I think Google's original sin here is making the ads look so much like organic search results. Someone placing an ad against a competitors brand name would not be a huge issue if organic results were still front and centre like in the "good old days" of early 2000s Google.

This is actually trivially automatable. First of all, brand keywords are something Google supports explicitly for this kind of targetting so they know from that direction.

More generally though, if you paid for an advertisement and the natural search result has you first anyway, then you should not be charged for any clicks to this advertisement.

> and would need to be automated somehow

Or Google, one of the wealthiest companies on the face of the planet, could hire some staff to handle this.

Well, on a good search engine, IMO, you'd have a predicted store based on the manufacturer (eg their preferred seller) then perhaps a list of top 10 competitors and something like "most recorded purchases after this search are from seller X" with "the most popular similar store is seller Y".

Of course Google wouldn't give that data out as then many companies wouldn't need to advertise at all to get top billing.

That's secondary & the reason Google doesn't have this is likely because the sellers don't want to provide this. E.g. Amazon doesn't want potential customers being easily redirected to Walmart purchases. One of the many reasons Froogle died.

The simple solution is that your paid advertisements are free if it gets clicked when you're the top result anyway. That way it doesn't cost the brand any money to bid on advertisements for their own brand.