Every time this comes up, I don’t understand what the alternative is supposed to be.

X (Midjourney in this case) may/not be trademarked in the user’s country - so what makes X so special that Google/others should rank this one over others? Does this mean X owns the keyword and other related searches on Google forever? That sounds worse than domain squatting!

Speaking of, quite often, X.com is already registered, so companies buy getX.com or just non-.com TLDs. Now which one is the right result for searches for X? The pre existing one or the new company? What if they’re in different industries?

Almost all SaaS companies have multiple comparison pages or blogs/articles/etc that mention and compare themselves with competitors - specifically for SEO to show up in those searches. Should this also be banned?

I could go on, but I just don’t see a situation where Google can solve this satisfactorily for everyone, without becoming opinionated and picking/choosing/preferring one competitor over the other. As such, they’ve gone for the easiest model we have in modern day capitalism - put it up for auction and let the market figure it out!

The issue you're describing is ranking results or ranking between promoted/ad content.

The problem more at hand is unless you're paying big bucks, they can and will place content that at best is another competitor, or at worst is genuinely trying to harm your users. Ads being inline and as close in appearance to regular results as google can legally get away with is the problem. There are heavily misaligned incentives at play, ones that enable a lot of malware and phishing attempts.

You're describing the exact (complex) problem that Google Search was born to solve. And at some point they successfully did.

If we agree it's something they can't solve anymore, letting them pay to stay is a disservice to the users.