You’re Not From Around Here, Are You? Fighting Deceptive Marketing in the Twenty-First Century

Deceptive marketing has hurt consumers and business owners since the birth of promotional advertising. As the Internet increasingly inspires and dictates our consumption choices, even sophisticated business acumen and technological savvy are not enough to withstand the harmful consequences. While lawmakers and courts have fashioned remedies applicable to some misleading practices, sly marketers with deep pockets frequently find new ways to trick unsuspecting shoppers and seize market share. This Note therefore provides a novel interpretation of prior scholarship to recommend a solution to a particularly misleading marketing practice—deceptive search engine optimization—in order to bolster currently available, yet independently inadequate, alternatives. Although some of the problems associated with deceptive search engine optimization have caught the media’s eye as of late, a much-needed solution is heretofore unexplored in law review literature.