EU Approves Google-DoubleClick Merger

A number of readers sent word that EU regulators have cleared the Google-DoubleClick deal. "The commission said Google and DoubleClick 'were not exerting major competitive constraints on each other's activities and could, therefore, not be considered as competitors,' and even if DoubleClick could become an effective competitor in online intermediation services, 'it is likely that other competitors would continue to exert sufficient competitive pressure after the merger.'"

Re:Globalization

[Dr. Eggman]

It exists from the firehose submission [www.cbc.ca]. Pilot error, it seems.

Nice link

[_xeno_]

So the article is at ... uh, nowhere. The source reveals the link to be: <a>

Great.

Thankfully we have the Firehose submission [slashdot.org], which contains the actual link [www.cbc.ca].

So I guess the theory behind subscriptions is that subscribers are paying to catch mistakes like that? :P

Re:Globalization

[xaxa]

Google already has a strong European presence, they have engineering offices in Dublin, London, Zürich, Trondheim, and loads more places [google.com]. Data centres aren't interesting -- only a few good jobs come out of them.

Google's announcement to publishers

[davros-too]

http://www.google.com/dclk/messages [google.com]

Not that it says much, but from the horse's mouth so to speak.

Re:Globalization

[nevali]

Such a huge amount of uninformed claptrap in such a short post.

It's really simple: if companies don't want to be bound by EU laws and regulators, don't do business here. Seriously, you're all more than welcome to boycott the EU if you think that's a preferable option. Mind you, nobody listens when people complain about US companies doing business in China--which has, in real terms, far more black marks against it than the EU--so it's unlikely that US companies will boycott a massively lucrative market any time soon.

Plenty of European companies have fallen afoul of the regulators too, you know, and they somehow manage to do just fine, only generally they stop screwing the consumers (or, more directly, the rest of their respective industries) once they've had their knuckles rapped. Take Siemens for example, who got fined to hell and back and have enacted a new era of corporate governance. Or E.on, who announced a complete U-turn on their previous plans to hold on to their energy-generation monopolies when they realised the regulator might actually be serious.

Of course, it's not like the EU is the only place where regulators and anti-competition laws do their thing. The US used to, before Bush had his way; nowadays the SEC seems to be pretty impotent, the FCC is a laughing stock, the FTC never does anything besides the occasional muttering about spyware, and the DoJ just wants it all to go away so it can sit in the corner and rock slowly in the hope that it'll all get better on its own.