14 DAY TRIAL // Whatever hopes Microsoft might have still had, after Google's acquisition of DoubleClick was approved in Australia and the United States, should have died by now. As a matter of fact, the Redmond-based company could have reached resignation after the deal was given the OK in the US, because historically there hasn't been any case of EU regulators ruling against a decision made by their counterparts across the Atlantic.
The Financial Times report that despite the original date for the decision to be announced, somewhere in April, one year from when it was first announced, the formal clearance will be given next Tuesday, despite the harsh criticism from privacy advocates. However, the OK rubberstamp is believed to come with some strings attached, closer to the conditional programming taught in schools: if you want the deal to be approved, then you will have to take some steps to raise your privacy standards. Else, nothing will happen and you will not get the clearance. It is called an if-then-else statement, and it's one of the oldest in the book. But I digress.
The $3.1 billion acquisition has had some serious enemies contesting it, among which long time rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft, but the protests seem to have faded away in the distance, as the cha-ching of the traditional cash register is coming closer and closer to Google's ears.
Among other concerns, the implications of combining the Google search logs with DoubleClick's cookies were seen to be the most worrying regarding user privacy. When addressed by the EU, the Mountain View-based company has promised to lower the time the vital information for its search business will be kept. "Anything to keep the regulators happy" seems to be Google's motto ever since the deal went under scrutiny, as opposed to the difficult time the Internet company has given those asking for the very same thing before DoubleClick acquisition got the spotlight.