April 16, 2007 | Monday

The Google/DoubleClick deal

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |News |Search Engines |Google

It was announced on Friday that Google has indeed purchased online ad display company DoubleClick for even more than the rumours suggested - $3.1 billion in cash. (As John Battelle points out, this is a huge coup for DoubleClick, which was sold for a ‘mere’ $1.1 billion only two years ago, and has since sold off parts of itself.) Steve Rubel was amongst the first to wonder just how long it would take the US government to meddle in this deal.

Lo and behold…

The Wall Street Journal reports now that Microsoft Corp., AT&T Inc., Time Warner Inc. and several other large Internet and media companies are hoping to encourage antitrust regulators to closely scrutinize Google Inc.’s planned $3.1 billion purchase of Internet-ad-services firm DoubleClick.

And so continues the time-honoured tradition of big business using government powers as an extension of its own; even Microsoft, who has had its own traumatic troubles with the US authorities in recent years (primarily over the inclusion of Internet Explorer in its operating systems), is getting in on the act.

The knives have been well and truly out for Google for some time now, and with an acquisition this massive, none of the competition was going to turn a blind eye and wish Larry, Sergey, and Eric the best of luck. Watch this space to see how ugly this gets. In the meantime, who wants to bet that LSE spent this past weekend huddled together at Google HQ, poring over stacks and stacks of DoubleClick data? (The only way they didn’t is if the data hasn’t actually landed in their hot little hands just yet.)