Google informed me that they banned showing AdSense from my account on trademark guidelines state that it’s OK with them if you use the word “Google” provided you...
... distinguish the trademark from the surrounding text in some way. Capitalize the first letter, capitalize or italicize the entire mark, place the mark in quotes, use a different type style or font for the mark than for the generic name.
(Google’s trademarks guidelines have a lot of rules – like “Don’t frame or mirror any Google page,” something which they do with every page you click on in Google image search results! – and also mention: “One of the conditions for all uses is that you can’t mess around with our marks. Only we get to do that.”)
Further than requiring capitalization, Google also suggests to use the TM letters in superscript next to their name. How any of this is applicable to URLs, on the other hand, which just don’t contain any rich text formatting, I don’t know. The trademark guidelines also contain the bit “Don’t register Google trademarks as second-level domain names” though there is no mention of sub-domains, which are third-level domains.
Why does Google even cross-connect departments’ needs when there is no real connection? What does the Google trademark/ legal department have to do with AdSense, except of course AdSense being another way to pressure webmasters (by including special AdSense ToS or else your AdSense revenues are stopped)? Is there a difference to Google telling you “we penalized your site’s PageRank because you used the Google trademark in an inappropriate way"?
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