Google surprised many observers back in April when it put down $3.1 billion to purchase online advertising firm DoubleClick. The deal spawned a certain amount of furor, and something like copycat purchases by Microsoft (who completed its acquisition of aQuantive) and Yahoo. Some six months later, government officials are taking a hard look at Google and its would-be acquisition.
It's actually been something of a long, strange trip to this point. The Financial Times reported two years ago that Google had considered -- and abandoned -- a DoubleClick purchase. Why? One reason cited, though not as the deciding factor, was that DoubleClick's use of "cookies" to collect user data for ad targeting purposes conflicted with the ethics of Google founders Larry Page and Sergy Brin. As everyone knows, these ethics are summed up in the Google motto "Do no evil," and they're part of the reason that Google once refused to turn over information to the US Department of Justice on the searches conducted on its site over a single week.
That show of backbone, however, happened in January of 2006, and, to put it bluntly, in Internet terms a tremendous amount of time has passed since then. Google's executives may not like the use of cookies in Internet advertising, but they are a standard practice. And Google already tracks its users for a number of purposes, from improving its advertising to paying the publishers in its advertising network to fine tuning its search engine algorithms.
Google has belatedly taken up another standard practice of big business that some would consider "evil," namely lobbying. The search engine giant recently added some in-house lobbyists to complement the lobbying firms it employs in Washington, and this year alone spent $580,000 on lobbying. That's a drop in the bucket compared to Google's net revenues, and considerably less than other companies spend.
It's understandable if Google figures it can use all the help it can get. In May, the Federal Trade Commission announced it was looking into Google's pending purchase of DoubleClick for anti-competitive issues. European regulators have also expressed an interest in the deal. And on Thursday, September 27, the US Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights held a hearing at 2 PM entitled "An Examination of the Google-DoubleClick Merger and the Online Advertising Industry: What Are the Risks for Competition and Privacy?"
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