Russian Regulators Block Google Online Advertising Acquisition

An anonymous reader writes "Russian regulators will not let Google buy a local online advertising company, halting a $140 million deal agreed to in July. Google had planned to acquire Zao Begun, which has a search and contextual video and text advertising business. Begun is owned by Rambler Media, a Russian company that own various Web sites and runs a search engine. Google said it is reviewing the decision of Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) and hasn't decided how to react. Slashdot has previously covered some of the issues surrounding Google's muscle in the advertising market."

Comments

Google made a major mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

They forgot to bribe the Russian mafia.

Re:Google made a major mistake

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

More like the government instead of the Mafia. China is the same too.

Re:Google made a major mistake

[marco.antonio.costa]

Is there a difference between them? :-)

Re:Google made a major mistake

[pimpimpim]

Luckily, the US is different. It has institutionalized bribery, just pay at election time and reap the results later. You don't even risk doing something illegal in the process.

Controlled propaganda

[unixarcade]

I imagine that Sergey Brin has already invested quite a bit of money into the Russian economy. Although if you control the advertising you control the propaganda.

Re:Controlled propaganda

[lysergic.acid]

what kind of propaganda has Google put out? controlling the media is the way to put out propaganda. advertising is mainly used for branding and manipulating consumer purchase decisions. perhaps they're promoting consumerism in Russia, but it's still the media conglomerates who control TV/radio/newspaper/etc. that write the propaganda and influence societal perception & cultural attitudes.

although in a consumerist society advertising dominates our culture, it's still the media that are the gatekeepers of information and our window into the world. the internet has actually democratized the media by allowing the public to bypass traditional channels of media distribution which are largely been consolidated and tightly controlled by a handful of media corporations.

by supporting net neutrality, public internet access, open wireless networks, and generally promoting a free & open internet, Google is actually helping to decentralize media control and content distribution. YouTube lets anyone create video content and distribute it to millions of viewers. Google search also helps people browse the sea of information on the web on their own terms--compared to TV networks that restrict what you watch and decide for you what information you want to access.

Re:Controlled propaganda

[eltaco]

ugh, enough already. google & youtube have censored it all. whether it's as trivial as beautiful agony vids on youtube, sucking chinese censor cock to get a market share or giving commercial sites more facetime; it's all about the buck.
seeing as you don't get that, I'm not surprised you see a difference between advertising and propaganda. same shit, different "smile".

maybe you can understand these words: don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Re:Controlled propaganda

[Anpheus]

I looked up this "beautiful agony" thinking maybe it's gore or something, but I'll summarize for the unaware here:

Women masturbating (presumably) and moaning with only their face shown to the camera.

Given that youtube wants to remain a family-friendly site, and your beautiful agony videos can be pretty easily found via Google, I don't see the problem. Youtube is a video site with a few rules, and they are allowed to enforce those at will. They host the content, they write the rulebook. Google is a search engine and they generally do a great job. And their choice in China was "Censor results" or "Go back to America." Given the choices, and the fact that Google informs people that their results have been censored as per provisions of the government, aren't you glad that Google is doing business there?

Baidu, leading search engine in China, doesn't inform people that their searches are censored, in fact it denies those allegations. Yet it's fairly obvious to people outside of China that the cost of doing business there is agreeing to such draconian rules.

Re:Controlled propaganda

[ijakings]

Noone is ignoring the fact that google is doing evil by our standards, and that censorship is bad. Yes we all get that.

But currently, its chinas country and their rules. Its far better that google is in the country, providing searches and telling the population that these searches are being censored than not, both from a business and ethical point of view.

Google staying out of china couldnt change something, and they arent doing evil by the standards of china, you cant just put the entire world under your idealised sense of morality, its not your world and you dont get to define the rules.

Now im not turning a blind eye to what china does and im not saying that by our standards its not bad (mmmmmkay), im just saying that its how things are done in China and google staying out of china would not have changed diddly squat about how the chinese government does anything. It does however provide chinese people with more information than they had previously.

Kudos for the Russian regulators for...

[Jane Q. Public]

... yet again being smarter than the United States monopoly regulators in recent years.

Hey, American people: if you want to look for reasons why we are no longer on top, look straight to your government. You have looked to them solutions but they have been delivering the opposite.

Try thinking for yourselves for a change.

In Soviet Russia

[Iamthecheese]

Ads block you!

It's not Zao Begun

[Cyberax]

Please, translate correctly. It's "Begun Inc."

ZAO means "Zakrytoye Aktsionernoye Obschestvo" (Privatly Held Corporation) in Russian, it's not a part of the name.

ZAO, not Zao

[tetromino]

The official name of the company is ZAO Begun. However, "ZAO" is simply the Russian abbreviation for "proprietary joint stock company"; in the West, an equivalent formal corporate name would probably be "Begun Pty Ltd."

In any case, the summary uses "Google" instead of "Google, Inc."; and "Rambler Media" instead of "Rambler Media, Ltd." Seems rather odd that of the 3 corporations mentioned, only Begun was listed with its full official (though miscapitalized) name.

Google overseas

[dj245]

Google has a fairly dominating position in the US, but other places it varies considerably. Most Japanese cell phones have a Yahoo! button on them (not a google button) and in China they use Baidu. I think the 4 different ways of writing in Japanese are probably not Google's strength.

There is a name for this

[Jane Q. Public]

... and you can look it up. It is called "fascism". Yes, that's right. What drove the Nazis. Do look it up.

Re:Really???

[pin0chet]

How is Google not playing by the capitalist rules? Just ten years ago, Google was a grad student research project, and now it is the global leader in Web advertising. It's crucial to realize how Google came about, because the firm that ultimately dethrones Google will emerge unexpectedly from humble roots.

Look, nobody is forcing Internet users to rely on Google for search. The reason for Google's continued dominance isn't because it is an evil monopoly, but because Google managed to build a platform that a lot of people like. The success of Google has spurred competitors like Microsoft to invest serious cash to develop a superior set of online services, Isn't that exactly what capitalism is all about?

Re:Really???

[RiotingPacifist]

how long has ms been ontop now?

faeries do not run the free market, its not perfect (hence the bailout) accept that the free market has its flaws and move on!