From The New York Times
Even in the New Alphabet, Google Keeps Its Capital G
By James B. Stewart
G is for Google, as the company’s chief executive, Larry Page, put it this week in a blog post introducing Alphabet, Google’s new corporate name.
G is also for genericization.
That’s the process of becoming generic, or “not sold or made under a particular brand name,” according to Webster’s dictionary....
That doesn’t mean Google has lost its protected status yet. Last year a federal judge rejected a claim that the Google trademark is generic because a majority of the population uses “google” as a verb for Internet search.
“To be generic, a word has to refer to an entire category,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, who teaches linguistics at the School of Information of the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of “The Way We Talk Now.” (He appeared as an expert witness on language for Google.) “People almost never say, ‘I googled this on Bing.’”...