User input/frustration will eventually lead them toward alternative search engines, or provide enough feedback to Google/Bing/etc to make them disable registered service name or company names from being used as ad terms.
I've been using Neeva for a while now. It's ad-free and (for me, anyway) on par with Google. I have one premium account ($5/month) and one free account (used for work) and have had no issues with either. By default, searches aren't saved, although enabling it can lead to better personalized searches.
Kagi's one I've heard great things about as well, although I'm not a fan of a business model that allows me to pay for X searches before hitting a barrier that prevents further use of the platform (theirs is 200 searches a month for $5, which seems way too low based on my use cases).
In any case, users will force the change, not any government or corporate pressure. Businesses' best chance of fighting it is to refuse to play along.
If you run over your allotment, you pay 1.5c thereafter.
That's a barrier. That's exactly what I was talking about.
Edit: Admittedly, I didn't realize that they just bill for follow-on searches, I assumed they stopped you. That charge per follow-on search is even worse.
I'm of the opinion ads themselves should be illegal. Companies can "advertise" in a catalog I can choose to look at, but would no longer be allowed to invade my attention with their bullshit constantly.
We've let marketers ruin too many good things as it is, lets just kill off the entire industry for the good of society.
Think about second order effects. YouTubers. News stations. Newspapers. Film crews. Publishers. Writers. Marketers (who do more than just ads). All impacted.
Many of the products we use everyday would no longer be viable. Even the premium tiers are supported by ads.
Engineering salaries would be broadly impacted.
The economy is driven by hustle, sales, and ads. I'd rather live in this world than one than one that has no ads. We'd be less productive: less employed, less eager to buy, less eager to work. Maybe some aspire to that, but that society won't be building rocket ships and inventing immortality.
I do hate ads, but they're better than not having them. And I understand their utility and the overall ecosystem they support.
I think this is a bullshit myth the industry uses to justify itself. People are capable of paying for things, and to the extent they don't want to then maybe we really don't need whatever it was the ads were supporting.
I mean, a lot of the "content" exists purely as clickbait with a tiny bit of entertainment or information attached so it can product place or sell ads. Fuck it, we don't need it as a society.
>The economy is driven by hustle, sales, and ads.
Allowing jobs that make society worse for profit because "economy" is just the broken window fallacy. We are better off skipping the job part and just giving them money directly.
> We'd be less productive: less employed, less eager to buy, less eager to work.
We'd be doing bullshit jobs less. How is that a bad thing? Lets redirect what productivity we do feel like engaging in on making the world better instead of making the people at the top of the economic food chain wealthier and playing on people's insecurities to get them to pay for shit they don't need.
In my idea world, if I am interested in buying some new product or service I consult a catalog. Opt-in marketing, not bullshit carrot and stick marketing, and certainly not the kind of completely unsolicited bullshit that keeps us from having unfiltered email, answering our phones, or using the internet without an ad blocker.
Google, Amazon, and Apple all allow trademark and product name squatting. It's gross and abusive.
Generic terms? Sure. But actual trade names for products? That's extortion.
These services aren't helping in discovery if the customer already knows the name. They're merely forcing themselves into that relationship and taxing it.
You then have to buy n-many ads across m-many services just to keep you in front of your competitors that would squat you.