Patrick McCarthy

FTC Looking into DoubleGoo (Google and DoubleClick)

The New York Times reports tonight that the FTC is looking into the Google acquisition of DoubleClick for antitrust concerns.

Many people theorized this may occur, so it’s not terribly surprising. However, it could be a shift in the tide as this is the first time Google has come under government scrutiny for potentially being monopolistic. Many people point to Microsoft’s antitrust issues as being the time where Microsoft became “evil” to consumers and started to lose some of their magic touch. For the record, Microsoft still makes an incredible amount of money, so I don’t think I’d say it really has done all that much damage to Microsoft.

I think the most interesting thing to me will be how the government looks at online advertising. Is it the entire industry? Are they looking at search advertising independently? Display? How different is an ad network from ad serving? Definitely some questions left to answer.

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