FTC Greenlights Google-AdMob Deal

coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission today said it closed the investigation of the proposed $750 million Google acquisition of mobile advertising network company AdMob. The FTC said that while the combination of the two leading mobile advertising networks raised serious antitrust issues, the agency's concerns ultimately were overshadowed by recent developments in the market, most notably a move by Apple to launch its own, competing mobile ad network."

Re:Hey lets let em all engage in antitrust

[Sarten-X]

If everyone is doing it in the same market, then it's not a monopoly, and not a problem.

Re:Hey lets let em all engage in antitrust

[clarkkent09]

It depends on how you define the market. If the market in question is "advertising" or even "online advertising" (as opposed to "mobile advertising" as is the case here) then it is absolutely clear that google does not have anything like a monopoly. The narrower your definition of a market the more monopolies you can find. What's so special about having a dominant position in mobile advertising that every other form of advertising out there would not be considered to be in competition with you?

This decision...

[VTI9600]

...should have been fairly obvious considering how the FTC approved the far more questionable acquisition of Doubleclick three years ago. They approved that one on the basis that competition would not be hurt since Google and Doubleclick were not technically in competition with each other. The companies were, nevertheless, placing ads in the same browser windows which brought up issues of consumer privacy...issues which were promptly ignored because, again, there was no threat to competition.

In this case we're dealing with a mobile advertiser merging with (until now) a primarily non-mobile advertiser. Again, no question about killing competition, and a much smaller price tag ($750M versus $3.1B) to boot. I'm not sure what type of consumer protection/privacy issues could be raised, but that's really not the question here.