14 DAY TRIAL // The long discussed Google's DoubleClick acquisition might be blocked by the Federal Trade Commission, Scott Cleland, a US analyst, said today. If you didn't know, Google was brought into trouble when it first announced that it managed to beat other rivals such as Microsoft and bought DoubleClick, one of the most powerful advertising companies on the Internet. Because it was well-known the fact that DoubleClick will make the Mountain View giant even more powerful since it already owns the top advertising products on the market, the Google rivals required the US regulators to investigate the transaction.
The main concern was that Google might infringe the antitrust laws since it acquires one of the company's rivals, a firm that was regarded as one of the firms able to compete with its famous advertising platforms. The FTC started the investigation over the acquisition but Scott Cleland said the regulators might block the acquisition by several reasons.
"My detailed analysis over the last several weeks leads me to believe that the FTC is likely to block the Google-DoubleClick merger because it will enable Google to dominate online advertising and dramatically increase the opportunity for market collusion and price manipulation in the market for consumer click data, ad-performance tools, ad-brokering and ad-exchanges," Scott wrote today.
Also, the analyst wrote a 35-page analysis, entitled "Googleopoly: the Google-DoubleClick Anti-Competitive Case", that is meant to present the entire case.
The Google rivals quickly responded to the search giant's acquisition and tried to take attitude to remain into competition. Take for example Yahoo, the Sunnyvale company that was quite in a hurry for buying Right Media, an advertising firm that is able to support the giant portal in its efforts to challenge the market. Actually, Yahoo bought the remaining shares of Right Media as it already was the owner of the company a few years ago.