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a) It is not against AdWords TOS provided you have permission to use their trademarked terms. Which Apple has since in the Developer agreement [1] they have been assigned permissions to use logos, trademarked terms etc in marketing material.

b) Google is incentivised to tackle abuse within their system. It's ridiculous and baseless to say otherwise. Lack of integrity in an ad marketplace very easily can translate to lost dollars. But unfortunately with spoofing being trivial it's simply hard to detect and manage abuse.

c) There is no regulation that will prevent this. App developers have signed a legally binding contract.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/terms/apple-de...



I don't think your message will register here. The OG commenter spent the whole comment bashing Google, and the comment doesn't even mention Apple. That should tell you something. If Google stops Apple from doing so as the OG commenter wants them to, there'd be dozens of hot takes how Google is abusing its platform to prevent Apple from advertising. And the same group of people would be outraged at Google again.


a, b) yes

c) regulations and laws trump contracts, not the other way around.


Not necessarily. You can waive your legal rights. e.g. agreeing to talk to the police waives your 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.


Not quite. There is some gray here. You can’t sell yourself into slavery or sign away your freedom of religion or speech.


  > You can’t sell yourself into slavery or sign away your freedom of religion or speech.
is this because of court rulings or explicit in law?


The 13th amendment in the US makes slavery illegal except as punishment for a crime. 1st amendment rights have been asserted in case law.


i wonder if it would be worth it to have an amendment that said "no constitutional right can be abridged whether by coercion or by choice"

it sounds almost whimsical: you have all the freedoms except the freedom to give up your freedoms


Terms and conditions do not supersede the law of the courts.


I think it would be completely crazy if apple did this without entering into a special contract with google. Theres no way some sales engineer just signed up for a google ads account one day


I have no idea why you think this is crazy.

a) Apple will be a big customer for Google but nothing compared to companies like P&G who manage hundreds of products or those who have more competitive search terms. And in this particular case it's neither.

b) Apple has a dedicated App Store Marketing team who likely signed up or maybe they used their main account. Either way it's pretty simple and you don't need to ask Google's permission.


Fair points, ty for the rebuttal


Perhaps spoofing shouldn’t be trivial? And perhaps they don’t fix that problem for the same reason telcos don’t fix their caller ID spoofing problem?




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