There was a post about this recently. They need to buy the ad to keep their competitor from being the first result. https://www.seroundtable.com/basecamp-google-ad-28161.html

Well, at least there is no law allowing ISPs to serve their site more slowly unless they pay a ransom (I mean business professional tier).

I had the same thought. Our PPC consultants strongly recommended that we do branded ads and I pushed back against it using this same logic. Ultimately we performed a test, but the results were very different from in the article—we did find that a significant percentage of those who clicked our branded ads would otherwise click the organic results... but far from 100%. And because cost per click on branded ads is so low compared to other ads, it appears that they are still profitable for us, even once we take into account the users who would have arrived through organic links if the ads didn't exist.

This was and is surprising to me. The only explanation I have is competitors bidding on our brand keywords and taking traffic that would have come to us absent any ads. Which makes the whole thing look like a nice racket for Google. Regardless, for now we pay since the alternative is apparently to lose those users.

If I had a brand, I'd be tempted to bid it up with ads directing to ad-blocking extensions. Does Google allow that?

It costs the ad creator money every click and rewards google for mixing ads into the search results in a confusing way. This is a sketchy practice when the ad is for the exact product or site you typed into the search bar - as another commentator mentioned, the dynamic forces you to buy the ad to keep competitors from stealing the spot. Toxic

It's more than competitors. When looking for a specific site like ebay, paypal or name of popular software, the first paid results are regularly untrustworthy, if not plain scam or distributing malware.

Either the legitimate site pays to be first, or it can watch customers go to hell, literally.

It's a defense strategy. And it's necessary.

"Nice organic customer flow you've got there. It'd be a shame if it all went away because you didn't pay us." --Google

"It's not our fault that our ads look entirely identical to our search results"