Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Utah Home of Interesting Search TM Suits

Are you familiar with this piece of legislation that's poised to be law? Utah is home of whacky things, but this one in particular will prove to be a game changer in th eonline world.

In particular, Google is the one affected. Essentially, anybody who wants to compete against a particular brand name online can do so with Adwords. You know, the ads on the side of google's search results? Well you can't actually put the brand name in the ad itself, but competitors can certainly compete for real estate for targeted brands.

Well big bran dnames don't like it, they've tried to force competitors out of the paid search engine. Geico actually tried to sue Google to force them to put only GEICO related search results in their natural organic placements. Essentially they tried to force Google to put all of their Geico web info for free at the top of the search results. They lost.

But it will still be interesting to see how the future suits going forward against competitors from brands.

This may be a case of Utah governors having little concept of how the internet works and unwilling to even adopt basic free market principles. But then again, this isn't an economics blog, but one discussing TM, patents, and the like.

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