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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.
After all, it takes a convicted monopolist to spot another one in the making.
one of the bidders for Doubleclick?
Unhappy loser?
They must be throwing snowballs in Hell about now....
There's a pairing that could use some looking at before Google & Double Click.
No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.
Did you mean: MS Urges Scuttling of Antitrust
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
...a justification of using the "sourgrapes" tag, this is it.
I trust Google about as much as I trust any other corp (not much at all) but to see Microsoft crying in its oatmeal is just poetic.
--
BMO
And Microsoft have been duly punished.
Should we give another company the chance to do damage the market by abusing monopoly powers?
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
Google is a publicly traded company and as such here's what's important to them.....
Making money for their stockholders.
There's a fluffy bunny love for Google that everyone has but they may as well change their motto from "Do no evil" to "We do less evil than everyone else". A monopolist Google is no better than Microsoft. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but giving too much control to any company, much less a publicly traded one, is a horrific idea.
Google is going to do what is best in their corporate interest.
Surprised? Don't be. It's business
It didn't just blow up, it's a rapidly expanding cloud of plasma.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You're comparing the Slashdot population to the rest of the internet. There's a difference; we know most of those ads lead to spyware or just don't appeal to us, while many people outside think "ooh, downloadable smileys" and click right through.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
And Microsoft have been duly punished.
I remember MS being convicted. I do not remember them being punished. IIRC, the administration changed and MS got away nearly unscathed.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Interesting that AT&T joined in. They are moving against Google to support their Net Neutrality position. But let us look at how much money there really is in this market and then see whether an almighty Google might actually be able to hurt AT&T. Google currently makes 10 billion a year from 281 million broadband users worldwide. That's is $35/broadband user/year or $2.90 a month. Just look at the price of AT&T's offering and you can see that Google's ARPU is no more than a few percent of AT&T's ARPU (Average Return per User). Google's ARPU is supporting various content offers through this businessmodel, more than 40% of the ARPU flows to the content owner. So at the moment AT&T can beat up Google for a maximum of $2 per month per customer.
So how big could Google's ARPU grow? In a country like The Netherlands 5.7 billion a year is spent on advertising to about 7 million households. This makes 67/household/month (and this number isn't growing too much) This is the total advertising expenditure on the national market and includes all major media: Newspapers, television, direct mail, cinema, magazines, billboards, internet etc etc etc. If Google can get part of that on a global scale, it amounts to a major amount of money. But now look at it from ARPU point of view. It would be hard for Google to get more then 10-15% of this market space ($6-$10/household/month) because they would have to replace all the existing ways of doing advertising and these are still powerful and sustain many content business models)
If a telco can his hands on google's revenues, they might be able to knock a few dollars of the price of a broadband connection. But $6-$10 isn't going to pay for the line and the costly upgrades. Just go and look up the financial information of telco's to see how big they are and how much money they spend on a yearly basis. Google is dwarfed by that. (Broadband reports said that telco's would spend $41 billion on network upgrades just this year, Google made only $10 billion last year) Odlyzko was right when he said: "Content isn't King" and we can add to that "Advertising will never be king".
So when AT&T says that Google is making money over their networks. We are talking about change compared to what AT&T is charging its customers.
Will Google get a dominant position? Only if they offer content providers the most money for showing a banner and advertisers the greatest amount of clickthroughs. That is why Microsoft and Yahoo are loosing out. The offer less adviews per day, that generate less clickthroughs per thousand adviews and pay less per click and offer advertisers less conversions. Why would you use them? Nobody in the equation is getting better by using Microsoft and Yahoo not the content provider and not the advertiser.
Now lets hope Google pays some attention to my pitch for Adsense for Charity. The idea is that anyone using Adsense can designate a percentage of their Adsense revenues for good causes or open source projects. Even if we are only talking about a very small percentage of Adsense users doing this, we still would be talking about millions of dollars per year) So please help out in spreading this idea, by linking to it or spreading it onwards.
Use Adsense for Charity
Setting aside the default "screw M$" spinal chord reaction, can't we concede that they do have a point here? The fact that they are guilty of being monopolists themselves doesn't mean they have nothing that's worth saying. Google's latest acquisitions have definitely set them on a monopolistic path as they expand ownership over content providers and now methods of advertising through those providers.
Sure, Google conspiracy theories may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I think few people would disagree that an internet largely dominated by Google and Google-backed products, generating more Google revenue (positive feedback, anyone?) would entail the typical monopoly shortcomings (less innovation once the market is consolidated, arbitrariness, a bigger buffer zone for failed services, etc.). Right now I can't help but feel that Google is almost administering a utility, like water or electricity. Half of what I do online is powered (or directly coded) by Google -- ensuring a major share of the advertising revenue wouldn't be so different to ensuring they get most of their rightful toll/tax money for providing those basic services. Sure, there's nothing wrong with these services so far, but do we really want one guy centralizing all the cool net stuff? I for one, have to hand this one to our traditional Microsoft overlords.
This antitrust suit will end in Google being declared a monopoly in the online advertising business. Luckily for Google, they will be allowed to define their own punishment, and offer discount coupons for discounts on B-level keywords only. ;) Yes, some of us learn from history.
Put identity in the browser.
In Soviet Russia, kettle black calling pot the The YOU
Make a few bad jokes on
I do agree that Google isn't necessarily the "sweet-faced cherub" in all of this, but from my own personal perspective as a general computer geek who uses non-Microsoft products (Linux and Open Source) more than Microsoft ones, so far Google have given me free of charge a good search engine with minimal advertising, an email system with almost 3 GB of storage space that (unlike Hotmail) is pretty good at catching spam and doesn't keep emailing me with useless adverts, the very useful Google Earth tool and "Docs and Spreadsheets" which I have found very useful for collaboration and for converting Word docs (albeit simple ones) to PDF. Plus I've not even looked at all the other Google services that I could subscribe to.
I do accept that MS does give quite a bit away to VB/DotNET/Whatever developers but for me, as an occasional coder in Perl, Python, shell scripts and a little C, there's nothing of any use to me that MS gives away.
So from my own selfish viewpoint, I'd rather Google was left to get on with it and MS kept their hypocritical noses out of it - and if Google does ever start pulling their monopolistic weight, I'll worry about it then.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"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.
Is there anyone here who actually allows content from *.doubleclick.* to their PCs?
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
Am I the only one who was disappointed when Google beat MS to this? I was hoping that MS would buy them and then force all Windows users to view the ads and kill off things like adblock etc for the Windows platform. This would have been the single biggest win for the non-Windows community ever because it would drive everyone who currently blocks DoubleClick etc off the platform.
Oh well, I can dream can't I?
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Google submits a significant number of changes to the mainstream Linux tree, as shown by (among other things) this recent lwn.net article. For 2.6.20 they landed up rougly between Intel and HP ... both of whom have much more reason to be working heavily on the kernel, especially on the server end of the market.
Of course, there's no way of knowing if they maintain whole new optimised subarches, special file system drivers, etc in-house... but I suspect that anything they do keep private is mostly not released because it won't be very useful outside Google. Perhaps they're limiting access to things that'd only be useful to their direct competition in immense data warehouses - but y'know what, I don't care myself. I wouldn't be surprised if the kernel folks would reject any excessively specialised or over-complex changes anyway.
That said, as you pointed out little of what they do is releases as OS. More than most companies (at some) - including some nice search and data handling tech and some handy libraries - but hardly the crown jewels. I for one do not find this overly troubling.
I do, however, share your spine-crawling feelings with regards to the DoubleClick association. I've never been fond of DoubleClick at the best of times, and don't like the thought of their data being combined with Google's.
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.
I doubt that anyone can be a monopoly in advertising.
Ads aren't like fuel oil, precious metals, telephone communication,
business computers or operating systems. A customer's lack of choice
in consuming advertisements means less sales for the advertiser.
The advertiser would then be unwise to continue allocating money towards
a loosing advertising channel and the problem would correct itself.
It's hard enough to imagine a monopoly on search with 3 giant companies in
the market but a monopoly on advertising is just a silly concept to me.
I wouldn't call this "the pot calling the kettle black", it's more like "the kettle calling the pot a kettle."
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.
But it's not always right.
We should be clear on one thing: There's nothing wrong with getting a monopoly by outcompeting or outsmarting others.
What's bad is using your monopoly position to deny other vendors access to the market. This means not only refraining from things that only a monopolist can do, but refraining from doing things that have uniquely anticompetitive effects when done by a monopolist. The fundamental axiom is that competition is good.
Google may be a monopolist as far as desktop search is concerned; if so it's probably the most unstable monopoly in history, thanks to net neutrality. We could all simply switch to yahoo tomorrow if we wanted to. The greatest danger relating to Google is in their service APIs, in which they could potentially induce developers to build applications on top of Google services, then crush the developers by the user of secret extensions. But they have shown no sign of doing that yet, because for the time being most of the innovation around Google APIs is coming from Google.
As odd as it sounds, companies have character, like people have character. Some companies (e.g. Lotus) never seem to be able to come up with a decent user interface, whereas surely all they need to do is hire some HCI experts early in the development cycle. Microsoft got where it was by cunning and aggressive competition. Nobody begrudges the huge windfall they got by snookering IBM over PC-DOS. They saw the potential and were looking farther down the road than IBM. But when they used their power to punish distributors who distributed competitor's products, they were doing something illegal and they knew it. The temptation is stronger for them because of the company's aggressive, strategic character.
Google is a company with a fundamentally different character. They are much more innovation driven than MS, which is much more focused on reacting to what the competition is doing. The only way to survive in a MS dominated marketplace is continual but disciplined innovation. The problem with companies that tried to compete with Microsoft is that they tried to compete with Microsoft. It's critical not just to think outside the box, but stay far from the box as possible, because MS owns the box.
Microsoft has forced the industry into a post-postmodernist style of competition. The postmodern strategy exploits niches that are social constructs of the vendor community. The post-postmodern strategy is to fulfill customer needs more effectively. It's back to basics, with a twist; you still have to look at what the competition is doing, but instead of conforming to that, you have to harmonize but not conform. Google builds its services on top of standards, but it builds them with an unique Google style and feel.
This switch in competition style is why we see so much more major vendor support for open source. Not that putting your thumb in the competition's eye isn't desirable anymore, but it's lower on the chain of values. In an industry dominated by one vendor, there can only be one winner at that game. So cooperation via open source becomes a possibility. Google is not a major player in open source, but the reason they often get lumped in with vendors who are is that they share common characteristics of having a longer term, customer centered strategy.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
But what does fair mean in this instance? The owners of DoubleClick no doubt think that the deal is quite fair, and presumably Google does also, so that leaves competitors, customers and content providers(the people that Google and DoubleClick buy ad space from). Ad buyers want the most eyeballs per dollar, and content providers want the most dollars per eyeball. No one can control what prices those people find acceptable, and thus what they are either willing to pay or willing to accept for a given ad or advertising space. So Google gains another chunk of the eyeball-dollar matching market in this deal, but they do not gain any ability to keep other people out of this market(because all I have to do to compete with Google, no matter how big they are, is match space dealers and buyers up more efficiently than they do). There is some danger that they get so big that it is hard for competitors to gain attention, but they can't buy up 100% of what they are selling, since all you have to do to make more of it is start up a website.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
They had to go through the court procedure, and pretend they were going to play nice in the future. And then buy various politicians.
All they're asking is that Googleclick are forced to do the same.
Indeed. But I reckon that's a very mixed blessing for Google.
Google's ability to rank the search results is based on links from other pages. Now, when the web was young and blue-eyed and men everywhere were free, they navigated using lists of bookmarks, and by following links. In many cases they published their lists of bookmarks on their web sites, so that others could discover interesting sites. This meant that most interesting sites had lots of links to them, which Google could harvest and use.
But now, when the main route to finding sites is to use Google, Google itself has less to go on. With fewer people creating links for it to harvest, how can it work out its rankings?
Of course, it still has lots of links from blogs and automated sources. But are those as relevant, as useful from Google's PoV? Have we reached a point where even the best search algorithms are being starved of data to work from?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Microsoft contends...
Geez, this is so freakin' stupid, I can smell it from the other side of the pond. It's a damn money game, if you want that dblclick so much, pay more, it's so easy ! Why come out in the light with "arguments" which smell so badly and rotten of piles of bullshit that it makes everyone and dog with at least as much brain as a chicken laugh out loud in pain ?
Of course they don't like the idea of Google taking something away from their nose. Of course they would want a bigger part of the online ad cake. Of course they would do anything to stop Google becoming more powerful in the area. And yet, instead of paying the price, they start antitrust accusations ? Now come on, this behavior is downright ridiculous. And of course they would want yahoo and co. on their part in this case, despite them knowing all too well what would happen to them if MS put their hands on a pig part of the online ad business. Right ?
It's easy to take away others' lunches while you're the big guy. Thing is, some things aren't meant to last forever. Go figure.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.