Digital Trends
Google Inc. has snapped up another startup in its quest to sell more visual advertising on the Web.
The acquisition of Teracent Corp., a 3-year-old startup, provides Google with more tools for customizing the online billboards known as display advertising.
The Center for Digital Democracy and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have filed a petition (PDF) with the Federal Trade Commission asking that FCC chairman Deborah Platt Majoras recuse herself from investigating the pending merger between Internet giant Google and online advertising and tracking firm DoubleClick. The reason? Majoras’s husband is an antitrust lawyer for the international law firm Jones Day, which has been retained by DoubleClick to advise on competition and antitrust laws and regulations related to the proposed merger. Majoras herself was also formerly a partner at Jones Day, and the petition claims she has previously recused herself from reviews when one of the parties was counseled by the firm.
In an ironic twist, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday in opposition to the proposed merger between Internet titan Google and online advertising giant DoubleClick. The proposed deal is facing antitrust scrutiny as competition heats up in the Internet advertising arena. While acknowledging the industry is very fluid with companies like Yahoo, AOL, and even Microsoft (which just paid over $6 billion for aQuantive) making large moves in recent months, Smith still told the Committee that Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick poses "an imminent risk of giving a single company the degree of market power that could foreclose competition."
Internet titan Google has decided to flex some of its fiscal muscle, announcing a $3.1 billion agreement to acquire online advertising firm DoubleClick, itself one of the largest players in the online advertising arena. The deal expands Google’s dominance of the market, giving it both new technology to compliment Google’s existing AdSense offerings, but also DoubleClick’s considerable demographic data and client base. Cash from the deal goes mainly to DoubleClick’s primary owners, private equity firms JMI Equity and Hellman & Friedman, who took DoubleClick private in a $1.1 billion deal in 2005. The acquisition is Google’s largest to date, and weighs in at nearly double the size of the company’ much-publicized $1.65 billion acquisition of video sharing site YouTube in October, 2006.
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