Google Doesn't Care About Competition

Google acquired DoubleClick. Google accused for antitrust law violation. Google investigated by the regulators. Google advertises DoubleClick with competitors' names as keywords. This is, in short, the entire story so far. Now, let's explain it a little bit. The Mountain View company acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion because it represents an advertising firm that is able to support the Google efforts to improve its ad solutions. Soon after the transaction was officially announced, numerous other rivals started criticizing Google for antitrust laws violation. The main reason? DoubleClick was described as a powerful competitor for the Mountain View company so, using the acquisition, Google eliminates the competition.

Microsoft demanded the regulators to investigate the Google acquisition so the Mountain View company was brought in the spotlights because everybody was talking about this transaction. Moreover, the Google rivals prepared themselves for new acquisitions: Microsoft paid $6 billion of aQuantive while Yahoo bought the remaining shares of Right Media for $600 million, all those moves being clearly meant to represent a response to Google's acquisition.

Today, Google Blogoscoped informed us about an interesting advert discovered on the Google search engine results page where you can see a DoubleClick advert displayed for the adbrite term. If you still don't get it, AdBrite is one of the DoubleClick competitors so the search giant placed sponsored links on its SERP displayed for the competitors' names and linking to its recent acquisition.

At this time, the advert is no longer available but, as you can see in the picture attached to the article and provided by Google Blogoscoped, it was entitled Adbrite but redirected the users to the official webpage of DoubleClick. Obviously, this is quite unfair for the other companies on the market and comes just after the search giant was accused for monopoly over the advertising market.