Many companies use the Google Trademark Complaint Procedure to stop competitors bidding on a company name or product. As this becomes more common practice it may hurt Google’s revenue potential and therefore, valuation.
I wonder whether this leads to the possibility of people trademarking terms and expressions specifically so that they can use them within Google ads?
This seems to raise a general issue. Given that a trademark is awarded within a specific industry, but a search term is not aware of the context e.g. a search for ‘Windows’ could be for building materials or for software. What is to stop people registering trademarks outside of their common use in order to block keyword searches?
In other words, given that ‘Windows’ is trademarked, why couldn’t you trademark ‘blog’ as a type of candy and block anyone advertising against it regardless of the context.