It’s hard to see the Google acquisition of DoubleClick failing to ride the regulatory hurdles in front of it due to any measure of market dominance, but this week the idea of privacy came to the fore as a means to block the $3.1 billion deal.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center and other privacy groups raised the issue with the Federal Trade Commission that after the deal Google will have access to more information about the public’s buying and searching habits than any other company in the world, and there are calls for DoubleClick to be forced to delete any information which could be used to identify advertising activity by an internet user, before the transaction is complete.
For Google’s part that information is a huge part of the value of DoubleClick and we have no recollection of any merger falling foul of authorities due to two companies holding too much data on the public. If so the three big credit agencies in the US should be banned and the purchasing records that follow around our credit card transactions would need to be deleted a few weeks after we pay our credit card bills. It’s largely a non-issue, bought to everyone’s attention not because Google has a poor track record in keeping privacy information safe, (unlike AOL which had to apologize to users for releasing a chunk of search data last Summer).
If it was an issue, then no company would be allowed to buy DoubleClick, because the same concern applies to Yahoo, AOL, MSN and eBay as much as it applies to Google.
The whole thing is an opportunistic excuse to focus the attention of the FTC on the whole issue of what information internet companies are allowed to keep on consumers.
Other rights groups which are complaining include the Center for Digital Democracy, and the US Public Interest Research Group, who joined in the call for the merger to be blocked.
Google is said to command 60% of the US online search market, with DoubleClick reaching 85% of internet users with display ads.
The EPIC’s action is aimed at getting all the major internet companies which collect internet data to give search and advertising customers the opportunity to opt out of being logged.