EU to Investigate Google Doubleclick Acquisition 88
the linux geek writes "Google is undergoing an investigation by the European Union for its $3.1 billion acquisition of internet advertiser DoubleClick. "We seek to avoid further delays that might put us at a disadvantage in competing fully against Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and others whose acquisitions in the highly competitive online advertising market have already been approved," said Google boss Eric Schmidt. The United States' Federal Trade Commission has been reviewing the acquisition since May."
Market Definitions? What about MS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Last I heard, the closest Google came to being a monopoly was holding 56% of the "internet search advertising" market. That is significantly less market than the general guidelines for investigation into anti-trust normally follow (70% or higher is the norm). The acquisition of Doubleclick is a vertical acquisition. That is to say, acquiring them does not gain Google any more share of that market. Rather it is a complementary market that actually hosts the ads on the cheap and is unrelated to searching. If you broaden the market to either online marketing or marketing in general to include Doubleclick, Google holds a much, much, much smaller share and calling them a monopoly makes no sense at all.
If Google had a monopoly, there might be concern that they were spreading that monopoly into this new market. As it is, however, one of their main competitors is Microsoft, does have a legally recognized monopoly and has quite obviously tied their monopoly to their internet search ad business via the bundled inclusion of IE and IE's default search settings. So far, the EU has not even bothered addressing that abuse, even though it effects this same market. Of course this is just one of the many monopoly abuses of MS they have not gotten around to yet.
Please, please, please for the love of Buddha, do not respond to this comment with a reply about Google search in Firefox until you're prepared to explain which one is a monopoly and understand what bundling is and why it is illegal only for monopolies. I'm so tired of explaining Econ 101 here.