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MS Urges Antitrust Scuttling of DoubleClick Deal
Microsoft contends that Google's $3.1 billion deal to buy DoubleClick would hurt competition in the online advertising market. And Microsoft expects AT&T, Yahoo, and other companies to join them next week in protesting the proposed sale.
one of the bidders for Doubleclick?
Unhappy loser?
Google buying double click is no worst than Microsoft buying it.. after all MSN & Messenger alone is an elaborate portal of advertising.
It's hard to argue in support of this now. Overture or whatever Yahoo's advertising arm calls themselves these days is hardly a competitor, and even Microsoft have admitted their own advertising offering is stillborn at the moment. If Google does get hold of DoubleClick, it means they're literally the only game in town.
When they can afford to lower costs for advertisers, having no competition means they don't have to bother. When they can afford to pay more to webmasters, no competition means they don't have to bother. Even a consumer can get screwed by this, since it'll be all but impossible to visit a site that isn't covered with DoogleClick ads, making 'voting with your feet' impossible. Very rarely does a corporate merger get to screw two sets of customers *and* the general public in one swoop.
For those who say "But they did it with YouTube, so no problem, right?"... YouTube isn't really comparable, since there's a lot of other video sharing sites. YouTube was the biggest, but it's by no means unassailable and it's users arent waiting on a cheque.
Regards,
-Steve Gray
-Cobalt Software
Google is not an OSS company. Little of what they do has been released as free software. How much have they changed linux to optimise their operations? Who would benefit from the same patches? Nobody knows.
Doubleclick was worth more to google because they could multiply it against the adsense data they already own. Microsoft didn't have as much to gain.
Search is the new DNS. Anybody who owned and controlled all of DNS would control the internet. Most of the search market is controlled by google.
Google is only limited in size by the fact that they are an internet company, and the internet is finite. But if they wind up owning much of the internet its not going to be good for the rest of us.
I would love to be able to look forward 10 years and see exactly where this is heading. The don't be evil bit may just be ironic by then.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Actually, MS is in that space. The problem is that MS is not very sophisticated and they are WAY behind. They are hoping that by buying double click that they can compete head-on with google. Not sure that I really want Google to buy them, but I KNOW that MS buying them will be a far worse event.
MS will have the ability to control it all via windows and MSIE (whereas Google does not have the ability to control except via natural). And while Google is tied in with firefox, MSIE still occupies 85% of the market. And with MS's past history, it should be obvious that they will tie all this together and kill off google. So what if they have to pay a later fine of 10-20 Billion? They will have created another monopolistic market that will earn them 2-10x that amount each year.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It strikes me, however, that even if this would constitute some sort of monopoly, it doesn't touch Microsoft in terms of harm to the consumer. First, I'm still not sure how Google can really abuse the market, even if they do control a large portion of it. People will still be able to use different search engines and different ad services. Plus, if Google somehow ruins the online ad market, it harms... well.... the online ad market. Am I the only one who's not entirely scared by that? I guess I don't buy the idea that, absent of ads, people would simply stop putting content on the web.
Maybe I'm screwy, but I care much more about the OS and Office Suite markets. I'm not expert enough to know whether they should take action to stop this deal with Doubleclick, but Microsoft appealing to anti-trust laws means they accept the validity of the principle.
"Ad-serving networks like DoubleClick place tiny programs on personal computers, called cookies, that monitor where an individual user goes online."
That's the scariest part of the article... that a publication like the NY Times still hasn't figured out what a cookie is, or worse, has but yet misrepresents it to scare people over to their POV.
So they want to stop Google from buying DoubleClick so that they could buy it themselves? Will they ensure that competition will remain vibrant if they buy it, or is competition just important when Microsoft is not involved?
I did another post elsewhere where I suggest that MS, Google, AND yahoo should be prevented from buying Double Click. There is too much ability to tie all this together. But by far, MS is the worse one.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Since it isn't illegal to be a monopoly, just illegal to abuse the position. And since Google hasn't acted like Microsoft by ever using it's position to wipe out competitors. Yes, lets.
Those who act responsibly should be allowed positions of responsibility. Those who act selfishly, should be barred from those positions.
But it would be better if MS, Yahoo, and Google were prevented from buying DC.
Google is a natural monopoly and has earned their position. Until they tie it to something or pull an illegal act, they should not be regulated (but should be watched to make sure that they do not do a MS). But it is in the consumer's best interest to not allow this.
MS, OTH, has shown that they are an illegal monopolists (multiple times) and will obviously continue their actions. Always. Why? Because it is FAR cheaper to cheat and pay the trivial penalties that govs. apply, then it is to have to compete fairly. They should also be banned.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Microsoft would immediately turn it into an abusive monopoly and Google won't. What's the difference between the two?
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and serial abuser of said monopoly power with an operational philosophy/culture that encourages this. Google isn't.
For the most part, their 'product' is invisible.
Maybe to the average consumer. Not to those buying online advertising.
While Google has many competitors in that marketplace, none of them get a lot of press. Or any press at all, aside from trade journals.
It's because none of Google's competitors have managed to duplicate both sides of their business:
(a) online advertising
(b) interesting, useful, highly usable information technology services
Google has good stuff on both sides of the equation. They sell ads on websites. They create websites that are premeire destinations on the web and sell ads on them. Nobody else really does both of them as well.
There are many competitors that do online advertising pretty well. And those are invisible to Joe Consumer, but not to those buying online advertising (hence the trade journals).
Tweet, tweet.
For the record, Microsoft doesn't really have anything to compete with Google in the advertising space right now.
That's the best argument there is for not allowing MS to purchase Doubleclick. Microsofts can leverage it's monopoly on the desktop to then control the online advertising business and then have monopoly on that as well. The way they used the same monopoly to gain monopoly control of the browser market.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.