Google wins U.S. antitrust OK to buy DoubleClick
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The Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday it approved Google's proposed $3.1 billion purchase of advertising rival DoubleClick.
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US regulators approve Google's $3.1bn  takeover of online advertising firm Doubleclick.
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La Federal Trade Commission Usa indagherÃ  su eventuali lesioni della concorrenza:con l'acquisizione una quantitÃ  abnorme di dati personali degli utenti                                            Google, la FTC apre un'indagine antitrust sull'accordo annunciato con la DoubleClick
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Google Inc.&#39;s proposed merger with online advertising server DoubleClick Inc. would create a giant that would control a huge portion of online advertising and hurt the Internet, opponents of the deal told U.S. lawmakers Thursday.
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Google filed with the European Union competition regulator on Friday for permission to buy rival DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, the European Commission said.
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(InfoWorld) - Google's proposed merger with online advertising server DoubleClick would create a giant that would control a huge portion of online advertising and hurt the Internet, opponents of the deal told U.S. lawmakers Thursday. The merger, proposed in April, would create "extreme market concentration," said Scott Cleland, chairman of Netcompetition.org, an advocacy group representing large broadband providers. The merger would leave online advertisers with "no real competitive choice," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith argued that the marriage of Google and DoubleClick will allow Google to control 70 percent of the search-based advertising market and 80 percent of the online display advertising market. Smith, whose company is still under court supervision for its ownÂ 2002 antitrust settlement with the U.S. government, suggested regulators should reject the Google-DoubleClick merge on antitrust grounds. "What are the economic consequences of allowing the largest company in online advertising to acquire its most significant competitor?" Smith said. "If Google and DoubleClick are allowed to merge, Google will become the overwhelmingly dominant pipeline for all forms of online advertising." But David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, argued that DoubleClick has a different business model than Google. "We are confident that our purchase of DoubleClick does not raise antitrust issues because of one simple fact: Google and DoubleClick do not compete with each other," he said. "DoubleClick does not buy ads, sell ads, or buy or sell advertising space. We sell ads, DoubleClick delivers ads." Microsoft's estimates of Google and DoubleClick controlling 80 percent of the display ad market is a "made-up number," Drummond added. A little more than a month afterÂ Google announced plans to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, Microsoft announced that it would saidÂ acquire aQuantive, a digital marketing services agency, for $6 billion.Â YahooÂ andÂ AOLÂ have recently announced their own acquisitions in the online advertising space. Cleland argued that the Google-DoubleClick deal represents the biggest threat to competition in online advertising. He called the U.S. government's antitrust review "a watershed moment for Internet competition." Google's own "uniquely monopolistic" mission statement says it wants to "organize the world's information," Cleland added. "No other entity currently has such a naked ambition to control or effectively corner the market for any of the world's commodities, let alone all the world's information," he said. In addition to the antitrust issues raised at the hearing, Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, voiced concerns that the merger will have a huge effect on consumer privacy. The combined company would control a huge database of customer data, Rotenberg said. Regulators in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe "appear to be in agreement that there is no merger that poses a more significant threat to online privacy than Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick," Rotenberg said. "This is going to be a real problem for the Internet if it's allowed to go forward." Google believes "deeply in protecting online users' privacy," Drummond answered. Google has announced plans to make IP addresses and cookies anonymous, and the company is working on several other privacy initiatives, he said. Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, asked Google's Drummond how the company can complain about the lack of broadband providers when its merger could create a dominant Internet advertising provider. Companies wishing to advertise online have "many, many choices," Drummond said, while most consumers have the choice of one or two broadband providers. But Hatch also suggested to Microsoft's Smith that Google could lose advertising market share if a better search engine comes along. "Where is the antitrust problem?" he said. "Why not just build a better product?" The online advertising market is consolidating rapidly, Smith said. Companies wishing to advertise online will soon be left with one to three choices, he predicted.
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InfoWorld - European consumer groups warned the European Commission Thursday thatÂ Google's plan to take over the online advertising company DoubleClick, currentlyÂ under investigation, wouldÂ erode consumers' privacyÂ and would push up prices for online goods and services.
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The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday approved Google's $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick, saying the much-criticized deal did not pose a threat to competition in Internet advertising.
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An Australian consumer agency says it won't block Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick because it does not consider the two companies to be competitors.
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Antitrust authorities will conduct an extended investigation into Google's  proposed acquisition of Web ad supplier DoubleClick Inc., Google said on Tuesday.
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WASHINGTON -- Google Inc. has hired a former Justice Department official to lobby the federal government on its proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick Inc., which is being reviewed by antitrust regulators.
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Internet marketing company DoubleClick Inc. (DCLK.O: Quote, Profile, Research) on Thursday said quarterly profit more than doubled with one-time gains, but its shares fell after hours
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By KELLY OLSEN  SEOUL, South Korea - Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said Wednesday that U.S. regulatory approval of his company's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick will not be hindered by concerns over privacy.
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The Federal Trade Commission has asked Google for more details about its proposed $3.1 billion purchase of online advertising company DoubleClick as part of an investigation into whether the deal raises antitrust concerns, a Google executive said yesterday.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft has teamed with public relations and marketing agency Burson-Marsteller on a campaign to garner industry support for asking regulators to scrutinize and potentially blockÂ the proposed merger of Google and DoubleClick. [ Plus:Â DoubleClick launches mobile ad platformÂ ] Called the Initiative for Competitive Online Marketplace, or iCOMP, the group's mission, according to its Web site, is "to highlight important principles in online services and begin important industry discussions around copyright, privacy, and competition." So far, Microsoft and Burson-Marsteller seem to be the only companies behind the initiative, though Gavin Grant, the U.K. chairman of Burson-Marsteller, said the names of companies and organizations that have signed iCOMP's online petition should be listed on the Web site by the end of Monday. Microsoft and Burson-Marsteller were planning to go public with iCOMP in a few weeks, but published reports broke news of the initiative Monday. On behalf of Microsoft, Burston-Marsteller has been sending out e-mails for several weeks to companies, organizations, consumer advocacy groups, and the like who are interested in "creating a competitive and dynamic online marketplace," Grant said Monday. Those companies have been asked to review the Web site and to sign a petition based on a set of principles inspired by concerns raised around the Google-DoubleClick deal. Grant declined to name any of the more than 100 companies or organizations that were contacted, and said he did not know if Google was among them. Google did not respond to requests for comment Monday. Grant did not explicitly come out and say that iCOMP was formed to directly block the Google-DoubleClick merger. Microsoft and Burson-Marsteller are interested in fostering a discussion to ensure that the digital marketplace remains competitive and they hope that other companies and consumer interest groups that have raised concerns about the merger will join them, he said. However, the iCOMP petition clearly points to the group's interest in taking a stand against the Google-DoubleClick deal, which opponents claim would give Google control of 80 percent of ads served on the Internet. For example, the first principle on the iCOMP petition asks signers to agree that "regulators should carefully scrutinize any transactions in the online advertising sector that would create or enhance a dominant market position, substantially reduce existing or future competition, or leave advertisers, online publishers, or consumers with fewer options." Google announced plans to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in April, a deal that immediately hadÂ competitors and industry groups crying foul over how much of the online advertising market the combined company would ownÂ and also how much access to consumer information it would have.Â U.S. government agencies scrutinizing the deal include the Federal Trade CommissionÂ and two congressional committees. Google has defended itself in blog posts saying that competitors like Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL also are buying up companies to help them boost online advertising and consumer marketing strategies. The company claims its move to buy DoubleClick has not prevented other companies from competing. Microsoft naturally doesn't see it that way. In an interview Monday company spokesman Jack Evans was more willing to voice his company's concern about the merger and to link iCOMP to Google-DoubleClick opposition, acknowledging that without that merger on the table, there would likely be no iCOMP. "Like others, we believe this proposed merger raises serious questions about the future of competition in the online advertising market as well as about consumer privacy and copyright protection," Evans said. When asked aboutÂ Microsoft's own anticompetitive practices, something for which the European Commission recently upheld a $613 million fineÂ against it, he said that Microsoft never attempted to purchase a competitor to become a leader in a market, something Microsoft and others believe Google is doing with DoubleClick. "It's one thing to earn your way into a dominant position in the marketplace, it's another thing to buy your competitors to lock up the marketplace," he said. Though there are legitimate concerns about privacy and competition to be had over Google-DoubleClick, to some, the formation of iCOMP might appear to be sour grapes on the part of Microsoft. The company was rumored to be in a bidding war with Google for DoubleClick, hoping to acquire the company to boost its own advertising revenue.Â Microsoft eventually settled for a $6 billion purchase of interactive digital services firm aQuantive, a deal that closed last month. And it wasn't so long ago that Microsoft was in the position of being scrutinized for consumer-privacy issues surrounding a Web services initiative called Hailstorm. The company in 2001 proposed Hailstorm as a central repository it would maintain for online user identity so Web users would have easy access to their personal information for online transactions. Hailstorm didn't fly with consumers or other companies because no one wanted Microsoft to be the sole owner of people's personal information.
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InfoWorld - The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will not try to block Google's acquisition of online ad-serving vendor DoubleClick, the agency said Thursday.
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Google Inc. won a major legal victory Wednesday when a federal judge ruled that the search engine's advertising policy does not violate federal trademark laws.