I like your thought experiment. Check out elsewhere in this thread how it works in real life. Thought experiments are great when they can teach you a new insight about how something actually works (for instance, Einstein and the elevator), but when they describe an alternate reality then they are less useful.
If you have a problem with signs near an intersection you petition the city council without touching the signs by your false-advertising competitors, but in the real world no flags are placed, but websites are forcibly removed from the index or pushed down so far that it does not matter. By analogy, you don't flag the bad signs, you go and burn down the signs by the competition leaving just your own.
This is one reason that during election times (when the tempers can run quite high) removing a sign of a political party can come with surprisingly high penalties.
BTW, if any company engages in false advertising there are other ways to resolve that.
> I don't have any skin in the game,
and
> I don't do negative SEO or anything not 100% white hat in the little SEO work I do.
You're doing very strange things to the analogy. To be closer to the real activities, it's like putting a bunch of red flags under the sign. Nobody (except the city coucil) actually touches the target sign. Nobody actually touches the target website. There is no direct attacking going on.
If you have a problem with signs near an intersection you petition the city council without touching the signs by your false-advertising competitors, but in the real world no flags are placed, but websites are forcibly removed from the index or pushed down so far that it does not matter. By analogy, you don't flag the bad signs, you go and burn down the signs by the competition leaving just your own.
This is one reason that during election times (when the tempers can run quite high) removing a sign of a political party can come with surprisingly high penalties.
BTW, if any company engages in false advertising there are other ways to resolve that.
> I don't have any skin in the game,
and
> I don't do negative SEO or anything not 100% white hat in the little SEO work I do.
Are inconsistent.