> Google almost certainly can, but probably has no incentive to do it for whatever reason.
This has been my conclusion several times after digging deep into some weird data and discovering one of these...'grey areas' where it seems like if they cared about their customers they'd be doing something about it, but presumably they prefer having revenue from unsophisticated ad buyers.
Some of the things they turn on by default are straight up rackets, "Search Partners" for example. Companies like ask.com are arbitraging keyword traffic by buying ads to their own search results pages. These are "Search Partners" that show the ads you're paying Google for, but they're full of dark patterns to make you click the ads, and cost the same as a click directly from the Google results!
