> 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.
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.