How Ethical is it to Use Actual Institution or Commercial Brand Names in Examples?

Question

In some examples in the main forum, I have seen code examples which contain the following scenarios.

1. Using names of actual institutions, where the institution is no way a known-to-everyone one. Using the names here will promote the name of the institution, and the act may be considered to bordering on commercial promotion. Moreover, use of the actual name is not essential at all for the example. Other names could have been easily used, perhaps making the example more interesting.
2. Using commercial brand names in examples. Again, the act may be considered to bordering on commercial promotion. And again, use of the commercial name is not essential at all for the example.

I refrain from putting actual links to those examples for two reasons,

1. I do not want to point finger to any particular member.
2. Putting links will actually aid the commercial promulgation.

Now the issues we can discuss here are,

1. How ethical do you think these acts are?
2. How do you think we can stop the acts? Simply reporting them will not solve the issue. The examples are otherwise very good and useful. Editing and getting them peer reviewed will be very time consuming for the community.

Answer 1

Without an example, it's very difficult to know the sorts of problems you are seeing. Certainly the network has clear policies on self-promotion. But it does not seem like the instances you see are actual violations of that policy. They are, rather, potential violations of this community's scruples. If so, it's very important that the entire community knows and the majority of the community agrees to the standards. For that to happen the examples would need to be clear and the purpose of the restriction should be laid out.

Since your personal scruples go so far as to want to avoid bringing attention (even censorious attention) to examples, we're in a little bit of a Catch-22: you can't explain the ethical dilemma without examples, but pointing to such examples would violate your ethics.

Good writing often involves using concrete examples.

Stack Exchange values and encourages good writing. Excellent answers tend to be more than just techinically accurate; they also engage to the reader. Consider the following paragraph:

When Knuth taught Concrete Mathematics at Stanford for the first time, he explained the somewhat strange title by saying that it was his attempt to teach a math course that was hard instead of soft. He announced that, contrary to the expectations of some of his colleagues, he was not going to teach the Theory of Aggregates, nor Stone's Embedding Theorem, nor even the Stone–Čech compactification theorem. (Several students from the civil engineering department got up and quietly left the room.)

Stanford (along with the final two sentences) is entirely extraneous to what the paragraph communicates. And yet, it's a detail that adds more than enough to leave it in. Even if Stanford were a complete unknown, the name of the institution paints a picture in the mind of the reader. Being specific makes for better writing.

Summary

It can hardly be said that using the names of institutions or commercial brands is promotion of those names in all cases. Cadillac answers might even go out of their way to include such names.