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.

Comments

Wait... wasn't Microsoft..

[lordsilence]

one of the bidders for Doubleclick?

Unhappy loser?

Re:Wait... wasn't Microsoft..

[MoonFog]

Let's be fair here, Google is substantially larger in the online ad area than Microsoft, so if Microsoft had won the bid Google would just be a bit smaller. Off course Microsoft wouldn't say "it's unfair", because it wouldn't have been. Now Google is more like the Microsoft of the online ads world. The irony is not lost, but you cannot just turn it around and say it would've been the same thing if MS had won the bid.

Hard to argue

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I have a very bad feeling about this

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:I have a very bad feeling about this

[asninn]

Most of the search market is controlled by google.

Is it really? According to Alexa, the top three websites in the world are, in order, 1) Yahoo, 2) msn and 3) Google. Maybe all the people who visit the former two do so for the news, or the groups, or the mail, but I'm not sure your hypothesis is automatically valid. Google sure seems to be the search engine of choice among geeks, but what about Joe Random and Suzie Sixpack? I don't think you can just extrapolate without doing any actual research here.

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.

Wow, talk about ominous gloom-and-doom prophecies. I'd love to be able to look forward ten years to see where everything's heading, too, but neither of us can. I think the term "FUD" is quite appropriate here: what you're trying to create is fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the absence of any actual arguments.

Oh yeah, and since I just read your comment again, let me give another example:

How much have they changed linux to optimise their operations? Who would benefit from the same patches? Nobody knows.

I'm sorry, but that's FUD, too, although some rather underhanded one. The reason is simple: while the question "how much have they changed Linux" is a valid one, your second question and the answer you give to that not only already implies that the answer to the first one is "a lot" but also implies that others would not only benefit from those alleged patches but also that Google is holding them back for the sole purpose of not contributing back to the community - being evil, in essence.

And while Google's contributions to the kernel are indeed much smaller than those made by other companies, that's still just FUD until you actually come up with some solid evidence to back up your claims. But then, the fact that you don't actually go ahead and *openly* accuse Google of doing anything unethical is probably evidence that you do not, in fact, have any.

scary cookies

[AdrianZ]

"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.