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Sarah Novotny is a contributing editor at Adotas. Sarah grew up in San Jose, California. Her educational and professional career have taken her to both Los Angeles and New York City where she received a B.F.A. from NYU. As a writer, Sarah has free-lanced for various publications focusing primarily on traditional advertising and media reviews. When not writing and editing for Adotas, Sarah is continuing her acting career in various theatrical and film/television productions.

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Microsoft Has Sour Grapes: Tattles on Google To Regulators

Written on
May 30, 2007 
Author
Sarah Novotny  |
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Microsoft Has Sour Grapes: Tattles on Google To Regulators

dodgeball2.jpgTwo days after Google and DoubleClick had struck a deal, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith called for regulators to give the deal a hard look. On the Sunday following the announcement of the Google/DoubleClick merger, Microsoft’s General Counsel made the following statement:“This proposed acquisition raises serious competition and privacy concerns in that it gives the Google-DoubleClick combination unprecedented control in the delivery of online advertising and access to a huge amount of consumer information by tracking what customers do online,” Smith said. “We think this merger deserves close scrutiny from regulatory authorities to ensure a competitive online-advertising market.”It should be noted that Yahoo! and AT&T also voiced “concerns” about the Google/DoubleClick deal, but Microsoft is the one who made the public statement.If the deal goes through, it has been argued Google would account for 80 percent of the ads served on the Internet. And what about the other 20%, well since Microsoft went public last month they have been busy makeing deals themselves. As most in the industry know Microsoft has agreed to buy aQuantive for $6 billion. Yes, that is nearly twice what Google is going to pay for DoubleClick if the deal withstands the FTC investigation. In April it made good business sense for Microsoft to presure federal regulators to investigate Google. But have they shot themselves in the foot, and will Google return the favor and insist that the aQuantive deal be scrutinised as well.This is the buisness climate of the internet titans. Google is the darling of the industry and Microsoft is, well, Microsoft. Privacy is really at the heart of the call for the investigation. It really has little to do with monopoly or lack of fair competition, issues which generally cause anti-trust investigations. Afterall, Microsoft Yahoo!, and AT&T were all eager to make the same deal with DoubleClick. Google just happened to succeed

Google has always welcomed the debate and has the advantage of the publics trust. Their whole business model has been based on an agreement of respect for the privacy of their users. It remains to be seen if this trust between Google and their users will remain intact after the FTC investigation runs its course.





Reader Comments.

I find it ironic (or perhaps fitting) that this article is written by “Editor,” yet it contains a slew of horrible grammatical errors, including misspelled words, periods where questions marks should be, and run-on paragraphs.

Who’s editing the editor?

Posted by Court Sullivan | 10:11 pm on May 30, 2007.

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