MS Urges Antitrust Scuttling of DoubleClick Deal

Microsoft contends that Google's $3.1 billion deal to buy DoubleClick would hurt competition in the online advertising market. And Microsoft expects AT&T, Yahoo, and other companies to join them next week in protesting the proposed sale.

Re:MS knows what it is talking about

[petermgreen]

MS certainly advertise on some of thier own sites and apps but i don't think they are in the advertising space resale buisness like google and doubleclick are.

imho there is a major difference between being a producer of advertising space and a reseller of it just like there is between being a farmer and being a food wholesaler.

Re:As the say...

[spottedkangaroo]

And Microsoft have been duly punished.

I remember MS being convicted. I do not remember them being punished. IIRC, the administration changed and MS got away nearly unscathed.

Re:Wait... wasn't Microsoft..

[Anonymous Coward]

The big idea behind anti trust law is that companies are not allowed to leverage an existing monopoly in one area of the market for competitive advantage another. Google are an online advertiser, that's the business model and although they are the market leader, they don't hold a monopoly position. I'm not sure they even hold a monopoly position on search.

Obviously Microsoft and their supporters here don't understand the basic concept of anti-trust law.

Re:MS knows what it is talking about

[Zerth]

Yes, actually, they are in the ad business, and I say you can't be a trust in an industry where MS is a competitor:)

They recently stopped using Yahoo's ad service and started their own. And it sucks.

You'd think being johnny-come-lately that they'd, you know, copy the good features of the other big 2 and support things like being able to upload entire campaigns for large #'s of keywords and ads. Nope, the best they can do is single ad groups, one at a time, in two sheets, one for words and one for ads, which isn't really faster than cutting and pasting them into a web form.

I recently had to change the text on several hundred ads and instead of merely importing a spreadsheet of the changes, perhaps generated for my by Google or Yahoo (which they do, despite the fact that it lets their customers try other ad sellers that support such a feature:) It took me about 10 minutes each on google and yahoo. I won't be done with MS adcenter for at least 2 days.

Re:Wait... wasn't Microsoft..

[Chyeld]

A monopoly is still a monopoly, whether or not you choose to call it a "natural monopoly" or not.

Monopolies are not illegal. Abusing the powers being one gives you, is. MS has, I've yet to see Google do so. So while it doesn't matter what the type of monopoly is, it does matter who it is.

Would it really be better if Google wiped Yahoo, MS et al off the online ads map?

Having seen MS and Yahoo's business practices, in a word, YES.

You can say "yes, but MS would do this and that", which would probably turn out to be true, but we have to face the fact that it's hypocrisy to cry foul whenever MS does something and just say "phew, at least it's not Microsoft" when Google does something almost just as bad.

Name one company Google has snuffed out of business using their current position as dominate leader in the search engine business. Name one competitor they've screwed over by pulling dirty tricks like MS has. I've seen none of this, have you?

Before Microsoft became the god of the OS world, they pulled every trick in the book to try to kill people in the markets they wanted to be in. They killed the DOS market by tying sales of Windows 3.1 to MSDOS. When that was blocked, they released Win95 under the lie that MSDOS was integrated into it and not actually a separate component (which was later proven a lie when people found out how to replace MSDOS with other versions.) Almost the same thing happened in the IE/Netscape war for dominance.

And when Microsoft entered the system utilities world, they killed of their competitors by outright stealing. Can you honestly say you've seen something like the STAC/Doublespace issue pop up with Google?

There is a very legitimate excuse to say "at least it's not Microsoft", whatever Google's 'evil' has been, it's been outside their business practices towards their competitors. Their mistakes have been working with people the Western world frowns upon. Not trying to channel the spirits of every robber baron that's ever lived. There is no reason to currently think they would turn into the next Microsoft.

Re:Hard to argue

[KDR_11k]

Yes but mergers are blocked by the FTC if they would create a monopoly.

Re:As the say...

[91degrees]

They had to go through the court procedure, and pretend they were going to play nice in the future. And then buy various politicians.

All they're asking is that Googleclick are forced to do the same.

Google contributes lots of kernel patches...

[Anonymous Coward]

You wrote:
"How much have they changed linux to optimise their operations? Who would benefit from the same patches? Nobody knows."

(Disclaimer: I work there.)

Seems like we contribute quite a bit back.

The kernel used in the Google Search Appliance can be downloaded from
http://code.google.com/patches.html [google.com]

Also, here are a couple ongoing, open source, projects at Google to enhance the Linux kernel:
http://lwn.net/Articles/199643/ [lwn.net] - kernel containers - for lightweight virtualization
http://code.google.com/p/zumastor/ [google.com] - filesystem snapshots, remote replication

You can see quite a few patches here:
http://groups.google.com/group/linux.kernel/search ?q=google+patch&scoring=d [google.com]

Heck, the guy two desks down from me is working on removing the command line
length limit; that's something Google needs internally, and he's going to
great lengths to get his code upstream (making it work in hppa, for gosh' sakes...)

Re:Differences

[dwpro]

Seriously... What the hell does that line mean?

Glad you asked. The general connotation is that they are a monopoly that has been convicted for abusing said monopoly status. Google has publically labled Microsoft that way, and Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison called them that back in 2004 [nwsource.com], so its not like the parent invented the term.

For quick reference United States v Microsoft [wikipedia.org] and European Union Microsoft antitrust case [wikipedia.org]
note that MS has, in fact, been convicted of monopolistic practices more than once. A repeat offender one might say.

People like you need to wake up to the fact their is NO DIFFERENCE between Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.

I think that it is quite unfair to stereotype all corporations based on the wort behaved ones. I agree though, that some media corps have gotten/are getting away with murder.