MS Urges Antitrust Scuttling of DoubleClick Deal 234
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:Wait... wasn't Microsoft.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:As the say... (Score:3, Interesting)
Should we give another company the chance to do damage the market by abusing monopoly powers?
Horrible premonition (Score:1, Interesting)
How big is this market anyways? (Score:5, Interesting)
So how big could Google's ARPU grow? In a country like The Netherlands 5.7 billion a year is spent on advertising to about 7 million households. This makes 67/household/month (and this number isn't growing too much) This is the total advertising expenditure on the national market and includes all major media: Newspapers, television, direct mail, cinema, magazines, billboards, internet etc etc etc. If Google can get part of that on a global scale, it amounts to a major amount of money. But now look at it from ARPU point of view. It would be hard for Google to get more then 10-15% of this market space ($6-$10/household/month) because they would have to replace all the existing ways of doing advertising and these are still powerful and sustain many content business models)
If a telco can his hands on google's revenues, they might be able to knock a few dollars of the price of a broadband connection. But $6-$10 isn't going to pay for the line and the costly upgrades. Just go and look up the financial information of telco's to see how big they are and how much money they spend on a yearly basis. Google is dwarfed by that. (Broadband reports said that telco's would spend $41 billion on network upgrades just this year, Google made only $10 billion last year) Odlyzko was right when he said: "Content isn't King" and we can add to that "Advertising will never be king".
So when AT&T says that Google is making money over their networks. We are talking about change compared to what AT&T is charging its customers.
Will Google get a dominant position? Only if they offer content providers the most money for showing a banner and advertisers the greatest amount of clickthroughs. That is why Microsoft and Yahoo are loosing out. The offer less adviews per day, that generate less clickthroughs per thousand adviews and pay less per click and offer advertisers less conversions. Why would you use them? Nobody in the equation is getting better by using Microsoft and Yahoo not the content provider and not the advertiser.
Now lets hope Google pays some attention to my pitch for Adsense for Charity [blogspot.com]. The idea is that anyone using Adsense can designate a percentage of their Adsense revenues for good causes or open source projects. Even if we are only talking about a very small percentage of Adsense users doing this, we still would be talking about millions of dollars per year) So please help out in spreading this idea, by linking to it or spreading it onwards.
true, true, but (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure, Google conspiracy theories may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I think few people would disagree that an internet largely dominated by Google and Google-backed products, generating more Google revenue (positive feedback, anyone?) would entail the typical monopoly shortcomings (less innovation once the market is consolidated, arbitrariness, a bigger buffer zone for failed services, etc.). Right now I can't help but feel that Google is almost administering a utility, like water or electricity. Half of what I do online is powered (or directly coded) by Google -- ensuring a major share of the advertising revenue wouldn't be so different to ensuring they get most of their rightful toll/tax money for providing those basic services. Sure, there's nothing wrong with these services so far, but do we really want one guy centralizing all the cool net stuff? I for one, have to hand this one to our traditional Microsoft overlords.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
I wanted MS to buy DoubleClick (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh well, I can dream can't I?
LWN.net knows (Score:4, Interesting)
Google submits a significant number of changes to the mainstream Linux tree, as shown by (among other things) this recent lwn.net article [lwn.net]. For 2.6.20 they landed up rougly between Intel and HP ... both of whom have much more reason to be working heavily on the kernel, especially on the server end of the market.
Of course, there's no way of knowing if they maintain whole new optimised subarches, special file system drivers, etc in-house... but I suspect that anything they do keep private is mostly not released because it won't be very useful outside Google. Perhaps they're limiting access to things that'd only be useful to their direct competition in immense data warehouses - but y'know what, I don't care myself. I wouldn't be surprised if the kernel folks would reject any excessively specialised or over-complex changes anyway.
That said, as you pointed out little of what they do is releases as OS. More than most companies (at some) - including some nice search and data handling tech and some handy libraries - but hardly the crown jewels. I for one do not find this overly troubling.
I do, however, share your spine-crawling feelings with regards to the DoubleClick association. I've never been fond of DoubleClick at the best of times, and don't like the thought of their data being combined with Google's.
Re:LWN.net knows (Score:3, Interesting)
- The LWN data is pretty limited (being based on line deltas / number of commits) and a single sample
- My assumptions about what they keep private are exactly that, but based on the fact that they do release more tech than most, and that it's in their interests to get useful things that aren't too critical or specialised merged. Doing so reduces their workload significantly, especially with core (non-FS/driver) changes, isn't bad techie PR, and lets them focus on any specialist stuff they *are* doing. It's speculation, but not baseless or wholly uninformed.
- AFAIK one of their more basic techs, the Google File System, is done in userspace anyway. Certainly most of their interesting work is.
Re:MS knows what it is talking about (Score:3, Interesting)
If anything, Google will find it much easier to slip monopolistic abuses past regulators and customers because of the following reason:
1) For the most part, their 'product' is invisible. It's not something you see on store shelves, and it all exists digitally
2) Their product is also in a market that's only existed for maybe ten years, because there's no history, people have no comparison of what is 'normal' activity and what is 'monopolistic.'
3) While Google has many competitors in that marketplace, none of them get a lot of press. Or any press at all, aside from trade journals.
For the record, Microsoft doesn't really have anything to compete with Google in the advertising space right now. The only part of Google's model they've replicated is providing free services that are ad-supported, but that's all. All of MSN's ads are provided by one of those companies which, while it owns a significant portion of the market, isn't getting any press. (I won't name it for obvious reasons.)
The cynical position is usually right. (Score:5, Interesting)
We should be clear on one thing: There's nothing wrong with getting a monopoly by outcompeting or outsmarting others.
What's bad is using your monopoly position to deny other vendors access to the market. This means not only refraining from things that only a monopolist can do, but refraining from doing things that have uniquely anticompetitive effects when done by a monopolist. The fundamental axiom is that competition is good.
Google may be a monopolist as far as desktop search is concerned; if so it's probably the most unstable monopoly in history, thanks to net neutrality. We could all simply switch to yahoo tomorrow if we wanted to. The greatest danger relating to Google is in their service APIs, in which they could potentially induce developers to build applications on top of Google services, then crush the developers by the user of secret extensions. But they have shown no sign of doing that yet, because for the time being most of the innovation around Google APIs is coming from Google.
As odd as it sounds, companies have character, like people have character. Some companies (e.g. Lotus) never seem to be able to come up with a decent user interface, whereas surely all they need to do is hire some HCI experts early in the development cycle. Microsoft got where it was by cunning and aggressive competition. Nobody begrudges the huge windfall they got by snookering IBM over PC-DOS. They saw the potential and were looking farther down the road than IBM. But when they used their power to punish distributors who distributed competitor's products, they were doing something illegal and they knew it. The temptation is stronger for them because of the company's aggressive, strategic character.
Google is a company with a fundamentally different character. They are much more innovation driven than MS, which is much more focused on reacting to what the competition is doing. The only way to survive in a MS dominated marketplace is continual but disciplined innovation. The problem with companies that tried to compete with Microsoft is that they tried to compete with Microsoft. It's critical not just to think outside the box, but stay far from the box as possible, because MS owns the box.
Microsoft has forced the industry into a post-postmodernist style of competition. The postmodern strategy exploits niches that are social constructs of the vendor community. The post-postmodern strategy is to fulfill customer needs more effectively. It's back to basics, with a twist; you still have to look at what the competition is doing, but instead of conforming to that, you have to harmonize but not conform. Google builds its services on top of standards, but it builds them with an unique Google style and feel.
This switch in competition style is why we see so much more major vendor support for open source. Not that putting your thumb in the competition's eye isn't desirable anymore, but it's lower on the chain of values. In an industry dominated by one vendor, there can only be one winner at that game. So cooperation via open source becomes a possibility. Google is not a major player in open source, but the reason they often get lumped in with vendors who are is that they share common characteristics of having a longer term, customer centered strategy.
Re:Wait... wasn't Microsoft.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because it's not illegal doesn't mean it's a good thing. Illegal or not, monopolies are bad for consumers in almost every case.
You can go on all day about the evils of Microsoft and Yahoo, and how superior Google is, but it doesn't make a Google monopoly any more desirable.
Re:As the say... (Score:1, Interesting)
Whither Google? (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. But I reckon that's a very mixed blessing for Google.
Google's ability to rank the search results is based on links from other pages. Now, when the web was young and blue-eyed and men everywhere were free, they navigated using lists of bookmarks, and by following links. In many cases they published their lists of bookmarks on their web sites, so that others could discover interesting sites. This meant that most interesting sites had lots of links to them, which Google could harvest and use.
But now, when the main route to finding sites is to use Google, Google itself has less to go on. With fewer people creating links for it to harvest, how can it work out its rankings?
Of course, it still has lots of links from blogs and automated sources. But are those as relevant, as useful from Google's PoV? Have we reached a point where even the best search algorithms are being starved of data to work from?
Re:MS knows what it is talking about (Score:2, Interesting)