LBi Netrank: Unlikely antitrust alliance over DoubleClick purchase

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Unlikely antitrust alliance over DoubleClick purchase

Posted on 1st October 2007 at 12:03 pm by Manley

While we wait for the result of the EU Competition Regulator's review of Google's proposed purchase of rival on-line advertising mogul, DoubleClick, following similar submissions to both the Australian competition regulator and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, some big guns who have previously suffered at the hands of antitrust officials are forming an unlikely alliance to oppose the purchase.

Microsoft, Yahoo! and AT&T have all been supplying the press with tasty quotes as the issue goes before the senate. Microsoft has sent Brad Smith, to argue that Google will become the overwhelmingly dominant pipeline for all forms of on-line advertising., the irony of which is not lost on us.

Microsoft seems to have set up its own straw man here and Google's David Drummand was quick to highlight to a panel of senators that Microsoft is the largest purchaser of on-line ads, an email service with 280 million or so users and a billion in revenues from display ads. . . They have a lot more information than Google has.

After these privacy issues, Microsoft's case seems to rely principally on the Sherman Act and, more specifically, the words "no one is permitted to buy a dominant position by acquiring its single largest competitor". With its current move into the on-line office suite sector, its dominance in search and the nature of its applications, I'd have put Microsoft itself as Google's #1 competitor, closely followed by Yahoo!, freshly bolstered by its acquisition of Zimbra.

Google has a solid base to work from, but if Microsoft does succeed in fouling the water in Google's multi-billion dollar concern, the hostilities should become interesting.

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Unlikely antitrust alliance over DoubleClick purchase

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