But those are easily recognised as Google properties, allowing you to easily scroll past if you want to avoid them. That's vastly different from selling "organ

But those are easily recognised as Google properties, allowing you to easily scroll past if you want to avoid them. That's vastly different from selling "organic" rankings, or boosting your own products. As an analogy: Google's approach is like The New York Times printing full-page ads for "NYT Caribbean Cruises" or whatever their side businesses are, while what Verizon is doing is as if The Washington Post ran "12 Great Products Now on Amazon" articles indistinguishable from their articles. To give an idea of how strict the latter would break with tradition: I once designed a full-page ad in the New York Times for a non-profit event. They made us change the design because ads are not allowed to use a 4(?)-column layout. Their own design is also 4-column and they want ads to stand out. The same applies to fonts, colours, etc.