How Is This Legal?

The purpose of the Lanham Act is to create a civil tort for consumers who believe they have been harmed by false advertising. You have not been harmed. You found a weird thing. Clicking on a website that isn't a website you expected isn't a harm. By posting this you are making clear you know it isn't the website you expected, so it's unclear you were even deceived. If you were deceived by, I don't know, wasting a click, the harm would be de minimis and you'd be bounced from court. You googled the Lanham act to quote it, so you know this.

This is a vaguely interesting thing to think about, but the extreme internet lawyer framing of the post takes away from the weirdness of the thing you found.

Possibly it’s a mistake. Maybe something mixed up at Google.

Possibly the Washington Post has an agreement with CNN.

Even if the Washington Post were deliberately trying to infringe on CNN’s trademark (unlikely), it would be a civil matter. CNN would have to file a lawsuit to stop them, it’s not illegal in the sense that the cops are going to be looking for it and proactively arresting people who infringe on trademarks.

This is somewhat against Google’s policies: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en

WaPo might claim - “we’re not pretending to be CNN, we are accurately stating that we provide breaking news about CNN.” And with CNN often in the news these days, there is some validity to this position.

In general, you can’t even use ‘Coke’ in your ad if you’re Pepsi, as in ‘Tastes better than Coke - buy Pepsi.’

I suspect the reason has to do with nobody being willing to actually sue over this. For example, are you going to contact a lawyer and bring a lawsuit?

Another reason is that laws are difficult to interpret. There are lots of laws, prior rulings, unintuitive concepts, etc. Presumably some lawyers at Washington Post and/or Google have at least signed off on rules that allow this kind of thing. That means there's probably some not obviously insane way to construe this as legal.

Regardless of legality, it's certainly terrible performance from Google.

Very common I think for like 10+ years and very annoying that companies can just buy up some keywords for competitors trademarked names..never could figure out how to get Google adwords to stop it or whatever and mostly just hope it doesn't happen /not worth the expense to competition when they can be spending on ads for their more targetted products and services etc

Perhaps it's not legal - I presume someone would need to file suit under the Act for it to be determined. That said, the link is highlighted as www.washingtonpost.com and the ad text also mentions The Washington Post so it might be arguable that this ad isn't necessarily misleading since it only mentions CNN in the header and nowhere else.

Who said it was legal?

Google doesn't seem to care much about false ads unless it causes them unusual trouble. If you pay, you can literally pretend to be whoever you want in a search ad.

You are looking to buy a Coke in supermarket, but Pepsi has some promotion going on in tie up with that supermarket so they have a huge banner right near the Coke section. How is it false advertising? If anything, it is true advertising. You want Coke? But you can have a cheaper Pepsi, wouldn’t you want that?

By the way, same thing happens in iOS appstore as well when you search in some popular category.

Illegality ≠ Enforcement

right click inspect element