jdMorgan - 12:20 am on Mar 7, 2009 (gmt 0)

> ... if someone Googles '1-800-Contacts', Google would not be able to serve LensCrafters' ad, even if Lenscrafter didn't include the brand term in their ad copy.

These legislators have a serious lack of understanding about how search and "keyword association" work then... They assume that Google somehow "knows" every trademark and all the potential competitors in each of those trademarks' market segments. You cannot just base the ad suppression on trademark-words alone, as the previous discussion here about searches for "American airlines" (small "a") demonstrated; The additional knowledge about the search context is required.

I'm sure Google's doing fairly well at this but with the current state of the art, it'd probably just be safer for Google to block Adwords and Adsense access from Utah, if ROI versus potential cost of litigation is taken into account.

Jim