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

MS knows what it is talking about

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, it takes a convicted monopolist to spot another one in the making.

Re:MS knows what it is talking about

[Zerth]

Yes, actually, they are in the ad business, and I say you can't be a trust in an industry where MS is a competitor:)

They recently stopped using Yahoo's ad service and started their own. And it sucks.

You'd think being johnny-come-lately that they'd, you know, copy the good features of the other big 2 and support things like being able to upload entire campaigns for large #'s of keywords and ads. Nope, the best they can do is single ad groups, one at a time, in two sheets, one for words and one for ads, which isn't really faster than cutting and pasting them into a web form.

I recently had to change the text on several hundred ads and instead of merely importing a spreadsheet of the changes, perhaps generated for my by Google or Yahoo (which they do, despite the fact that it lets their customers try other ad sellers that support such a feature:) It took me about 10 minutes each on google and yahoo. I won't be done with MS adcenter for at least 2 days.

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.

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

[Chyeld]

A monopoly is still a monopoly, whether or not you choose to call it a "natural monopoly" or not. Monopolies are not illegal. Abusing the powers being one gives you, is. MS has, I've yet to see Google do so. So while it doesn't matter what the type of monopoly is, it does matter who it is.

Would it really be better if Google wiped Yahoo, MS et al off the online ads map?

Having seen MS and Yahoo's business practices, in a word, YES.

You can say "yes, but MS would do this and that", which would probably turn out to be true, but we have to face the fact that it's hypocrisy to cry foul whenever MS does something and just say "phew, at least it's not Microsoft" when Google does something almost just as bad. Name one company Google has snuffed out of business using their current position as dominate leader in the search engine business. Name one competitor they've screwed over by pulling dirty tricks like MS has. I've seen none of this, have you?

Before Microsoft became the god of the OS world, they pulled every trick in the book to try to kill people in the markets they wanted to be in. They killed the DOS market by tying sales of Windows 3.1 to MSDOS. When that was blocked, they released Win95 under the lie that MSDOS was integrated into it and not actually a separate component (which was later proven a lie when people found out how to replace MSDOS with other versions.) Almost the same thing happened in the IE/Netscape war for dominance.

And when Microsoft entered the system utilities world, they killed of their competitors by outright stealing. Can you honestly say you've seen something like the STAC/Doublespace issue pop up with Google?

There is a very legitimate excuse to say "at least it's not Microsoft", whatever Google's 'evil' has been, it's been outside their business practices towards their competitors. Their mistakes have been working with people the Western world frowns upon. Not trying to channel the spirits of every robber baron that's ever lived. There is no reason to currently think they would turn into the next Microsoft.

Microsoft concerned about Anti-Trust?

[Anonymous Coward]

They must be throwing snowballs in Hell about now....

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.

Re:As the say...

[spottedkangaroo]

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.

Re:I'm glad they lost

[Daengbo]

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.

Could it not be argued this way?

[pandrijeczko]

From the point of we normal mortal users, if Google gets hold of DoubleClick then (as we've seen historically with them) they'll keep to low key advertising that isn't in your face - unlike Microsoft who will no doubt use any means to ram Vista down our throats with Flash-based adverts.

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.

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.

The cynical position is usually right.

[hey!]

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.