> You are right - That’s another practice is morally dubious (And imo should be outlawed!)

Where this gets tricky is when a business has a name along the lines of [city name] [generic product category].

If this was outlawed, a competitor to a business named Foo-town Yard Care would be effectively blocked from advertising on Google.

Another interesting policy is that Google's Ad policy says "We don’t investigate or restrict trademarks as keywords.", however they will protect against ads on their own product search terms and trademarks.

I work for a company where our competitors are paying for ads over our brandname, but try to do that for Google...

> Another interesting policy is that Google's Ad policy says "We don’t investigate or restrict trademarks as keywords.", however they will protect against ads on their own product search terms and trademarks.

Sounds like an anti-trust issue.

Can you get a trademark for Foo-town Yard Care?

Why wouldn’t you be able to?

Specific-word plus generic word(s) seems to be a good formula for trademarks.

$mycity lawn care would be just fine. But it would make it difficult to let’s others advertise for lawn care in $mycity.

That would be classed as a descriptive mark and is unlikely to be granted registration.

> Descriptive marks are a type of trademark that are usually composed of a word or words that merely describe a product or that identify the characteristics of a product and are generally considered weak marks. In other words, these are descriptions that could be attributed to the goods or services offered by a business. Generally, such marks are unlikely to be granted registration or protection under trademark law. However, descriptive words may be registered and protected by the law if they acquire “secondary meaning.” This happens when the original or primary meaning of the descriptive words becomes exclusively associated with a particular business.

Source: https://www.kirkpatricklawpc.com/blog/what-descriptive-trade...

But don't consumers have a right to see options. To me it's like a competitor buy a billboard or the location next store

Eh, I see it as different to a billboard - a lot of people use google as the only way to find your site where they type in a brand name to find your business (ie lots of people don’t use urls).

This is putting a step inbetween someone trying to access your website where they HAVE to read about a competitor (because they have to read to see if it’s your site or not). Your competitor can even choose the wording of their link and description, while you are stuck with something google has arbitrarily chosen.

It’s more akin to hiring people to stand outside the entrance of your competitors store, and when they see people going in they go up and try to convince the people to your store rather than the competitors.