Dunce Award: Utah's Lawmakers Outlaw Keyword Bidding
I'm surprised this hasn't shown up in the news before now, but apparently, the governor of my good state of Utah just signed a Utah law last month that makes it illegal for search advertisers to bid on their competitors' trademarked keywords. (here's the law) There are obviously two sides to the argument--most advertisers want to bid on their competitors' keywords while not allowing competitors to do the same to them--but that's not the point of this post. The point is, it is a complete waste of the legislature's time (and my tax dollars) to create this law. It's a pointless law that won't ever hold up--it's an issue that has been rehashed so many times and will continue to be for as long as the search engines offer keyword advertising. My personal feeling is that there should be no restrictions on trademark bidding at all, but the search engines actually have somewhat strict and I think very fair guidelines as to how advertisers can bid on trademarked terms. What's the point of having a law that's only valid in Utah to disallow trademark bids? It's a law to fix something that isn't broken! It's stupid! What a joke.
In fact, it's going to cause a lot more problems and cost the Utah tax payers a lot of money as they go through legal battles to try to defend their stupid law, which is very annoying. Besides being annoying, it's getting more than a little embarrassing how clueless our legislature is when it comes to enacting lame Internet laws...as pointed out by Eric Goldman.
Unfortunately, we're living up the reputation we have as clueless hicks here in Utah.
Oh, yeah, it was slashdotted and I'm sure will be all over the news (at least the news/blogs I read) by tomorrow.
In fact, it's going to cause a lot more problems and cost the Utah tax payers a lot of money as they go through legal battles to try to defend their stupid law, which is very annoying. Besides being annoying, it's getting more than a little embarrassing how clueless our legislature is when it comes to enacting lame Internet laws...as pointed out by Eric Goldman.
Unfortunately, we're living up the reputation we have as clueless hicks here in Utah.
Oh, yeah, it was slashdotted and I'm sure will be all over the news (at least the news/blogs I read) by tomorrow.
posted by Dave @ 5:48 PM
1 Comments:
At 8:13 AM,
Bart Gibby, Utah SEO said…
You know its funny, why don't law makers actually take into consideration "law enforcement" costs? Like I completely agree with you Dave. A free market system regulates its self in time, it just takes time. Why are they destroying the free market system?
Oh thats right they live in a world of boxes, where they think they can control anything they want. I guess they just can't see outside of that box sometimes can they.
Or, they own (have shares in) several companies themselves and are simply implementing a business tactic which will create barriers to market entry for new companies.
Aaron Wall, was complaining a bit about creating his brand on his blog last year. How before he started his www.SEOBook.com site that there weren't any searches for the key phrase. But a year later thousands of searches are done a month for that term.
Some people forget that, competition in the market place is what makes the products/services better!
Flat out the only people benefiting from a law like this are the companies who have established brand names. Not the industry innovators, and definitely not the consumer!
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