Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

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.

Labels: duh, keywords, laws, ppc, trademark, utah